Thousands headed to this Missouri town’s mushroom festival to have fun with fungi
If there is a town in Missouri that knows how to have a ton of fun with fungi, that would be Richmond, a Ray County hamlet of about 6,000 souls 40 miles northeast of Kansas City.
Thousands of people are about to descend on the town over the next three days for the town’s annual Mushroom Festival, in its 44th year.
Richmond’s magnificent mushroom obsession involves a carnival, popular car show, entertainment and more than 200 vendors that take over the center of town selling more mushroom-related items than you can shake a walking stick at.
The Omnivorium food truck from KCK, painted with a big ol’ morel on the side, will be back, serving up mushroom burgers and fried mushrooms. The crispy shrooms, dipped in ranch sauce, have become a crowd favorite.
A couple of vendors will sell fresh-picked morels. “Those go pretty fast,” warned organizer Lesley Green. “We usually have people who come first thing on Friday morning who look for the vendors.
“And then we’ll have a crochet vendor that will crochet little mushrooms. Then we also have a hat vendor that will sell hats with mushrooms on them, a lot of wood mushrooms, walking sticks with mushrooms on top.”
This year there’s a giveaway of a 3D-printed morel that looks real enough to eat.
A Mr. and Miss Mushroom will be chosen in a contest for the little ones.
And someone will go home with bragging rights for finding the Biggest Mushroom of the season. This week the woods around the town — known as fertile hunting grounds and the reason for the town’s mushroom adoration — have been full of foragers.
Last year’s winner, recalls Green, was a chunky whopper, taller than 12 inches, more than double a typical morel.
The winner earns “a little notoriety,” said Green.
She is the executive director of the town’s historic Farris Theatre, built in 1901. The nonprofit Friends of the Farris took over running the festival after the pandemic. Proceeds benefit the theater.
“We usually have about 6,000 that come in here. And we do have a lot of people that come in from the Kansas City area,” she said of the festival.
She herself is not a mushroom hunter but soon learned of the abundance of morels around Richmond when she moved to town.
Mushroom hunting is so popular in Missouri that it’s tradition in many families. The most serious of hunters protect the whereabouts of their favorite spots as if they were matters of national security.
Tromping slowly, methodically through miles of often-secluded woods, looking under brush piles, in ravines and thickets, going into areas even deer hunters avoid often yields more than mushrooms. (Sadly, and more often than you’d think, the occasional body.)
A couple of years ago the Missouri Morel Mushroom Hunting page on Facebook asked: “What is the strangest thing you ever found while hunting for mushrooms?”
A BEAR jawbone!
A working iPhone lost a few months before I found it, was able to find the owner and return it.
I walked up on about 10 tombstones in the middle of nowhere in the woods ... they was super old and creepy!
I found two Harley-Davidson helmets side by side.
Fire hydrant literally in the middle of nowhere....Pants hanging in the woods like someone was coming back to get them.
A wooden cross that wasn’t there the week before! In the middle of the woods.
Found in an urban forest in Springfield. A Brunswick ball with the name Ruth, on it. She’s now in my back yard.
At one time, Richmond considered itself the mushroom capital of the world. Green wasn’t sure how the nickname came about.
Google identifies Kennett Square in Pennsylvania as the current “Mushroom Capital of the World.” NPR once explained half of America’s mushrooms are grown near the town.
Ah, but does the town have a Mr. and Miss Mushroom?
This story was originally published May 1, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
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