Through the Depths of Time

Speakeasies, dance floors and moonshine stills. Fall-out shelters and root cellars. Rock art murals and gunpowder mines.

People have probed the vast grotto zone of East Tennessee for thousands of years, and the rich archaeological footprints they left behind proves that caves have long aroused the human curiosity.

“You have a chance to go exploring where nobody has been before and you don’t know exactly what you will find,” says Larry Matthews, the Tennessee author of more than two dozen books on caves, most of them in East Tennessee.

Venturing into the depths of a cave is entering the unknown—an other-worldly place vastly from our own. The insatiable urge to explore the subterranean chambers defies logic, however. Caves are quite hostile and uninhabitable, but their magnetism has drawn humans inside them for eons, not only to explore their strange physical realm but the metaphysical one as well.

Clocking in with more than 10,000 caves, Tennessee has more than any other state, outpacing the next closest contender by the thousands and accounting for more than half of all known caves in the country.

The mystery of how caves were used is part of their intrigue. Puzzling out the history of a cave isn’t always easy. Written accounts are rarely part of the historical record, especially when the things going on inside were meant to be hidden.

Lost Sea Caverns in Sweetwater, Tennessee, has a long and storied past, one that captures just about every human use of caves under one cavern. It was probed during the Civil War as a source of salt peter for gunpowder. It was a root cellar for early settlers. It housed moonshiners, cockfighting rings and a speakeasy during the 1910s and ‘20s. And it had a brief but colorful stint as the Cavern Tavern in post WWII years.

“They had a wooden dance floor down there and they say the acoustics were wonderful,” says Lisa McClung, general manager of Lost Sea Caverns. “They say they had pinball machines and a piano down there, but I don’t begin to know how they got all that stuff down there.”

The cave housed a mushroom farm in the 1940s, and eventually was developed as a signature tourist attraction. Even then, it doubled as a fall-out shelter during the Cold War, with provisions stockpiled inside. A few of boxes were never carted out and are still seen on tours today.

Caves also served as a social gathering places. Locals living near Cumberland Caverns would hold hay wagon parties at the cave, taking picnics inside the big entry room. Caves were regularly pressed into service as speakeasies during Prohibition.

“They were selling moonshine on the side and you had a band and that was the hottest thing around,” Matthews says.

The local city council allegedly held meetings inside Bristol Caverns to escape summer heat. One of the cave rooms is dubbed as Mayor Preston’s Chamber, Matthews adds.

Caves also served as hiding places. Two Civil War soldiers holed up in Linville Caverns in North Carolina to hide from the Home Guard, the roving enforcers of the Confederacy known for exacting brutal punishment on deserters. The fleeing soldiers were ultimately betrayed by the smoke from their own fires, however.

“They survived by building fires in there on a small sandbar, but the smoke would filter out of the cave eventually and the locals saw the smoke coming out,” recounts Andrew Quinn, a guide at Linville Caverns.

Mother of invention

Over the epochs, humans have eyed caves as an economic resource. East Tennessee is pocked with caves, thousands of them, and it didn’t take early settlers long to figure this out. They used caves as shelters while building a new cabin or during hunting excursions. Civil War troops even used caves as temporary quarters while on the move.

“They would write their names and units on the walls, so you can actually track different movements of both the Northern and Southern armies,” says Jan Simek, an archaeologist and professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Appalachian settlers found the cool climes of caves ideal for food storage.

“There is vernacular folk use of caves for root cellars and spring houses,” says Dr. Joe Douglas, a professor at Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin, Tennessee. “There are even examples where the entire community might use a cave for collective storage.”

Red clay from caves was mixed with buttermilk to make paint. Gypsum was also extracted from caves and ground up to make a white plaster. And salt peter was extensively mined for gunpowder.

“The settlers were pragmatic people and caves were a resource on the land, just like timber or wildlife,” says Douglas, an environmental historian who specializes in the historic relationships between people and caves in Tennessee.

Cave explorers didn’t always find what they were looking for. At Linville Caverns in North Carolina, the name W.E. Hidden is engraved on the cave walls, with the date 1884. Hidden was on a mountain expedition commissioned by Thomas Edison to search for platinum, a key ingredient for incandescent light bulbs, but came up empty.

While caves were an economic commodity, they were also explored for the sheer adventure of it.

“There is this idea that emerged in Western society that caves are natural curiosities. You obviously have a lot of people who were exploring caves simply because they were something different,” says Douglas.

A downhill slog

The entrepreneurial spirit, inspired by the wonders of subterranean chambers, gave rise to a lively era in the human history of caves: the tourist attraction.

The earliest show caves were close to railroad stops, with carriages greeting passengers to take them to the nearby cave entrance. But by the 1920s, there was an explosion of commercial cave attractions.

“Once people got automobiles and roads got paved,” Matthews says.

Turning a cave into a tourist attraction took more than the lucky break of finding a cavern entrance on the back forty. It took grit and fortitude. It took ingenuity and hard labor. And it took cash.

For Bill Vananda and Harry Myers, the dream of turning their childhood hideout of Tuckaleechee Caverns into a tourist show cave was a two-decade journey. As boys, they muscled a 50-foot fallen hemlock trunk through a cave opening, and used the stubs of branches as ladder rungs to climb in and out. They explored and played in the caverns with homespun lamps made from pop-bottles and a kerosene-soaked rag. For years, they kept their cave a secret. After college and going off to war, they returned home, married and started families, but they never forgot the cave.

Needing cash to buy the land around the cave, they went off to Alaska for work and came home with the money they needed. It took them four more years to dig out an entrance and excavate passageways. They carried hundreds of tons of sand, cement and gravel into the cave on their backs to build steps and walkways before finally opening it to the public in 1953, charging 50 cents a head for guided tours. The descendants of Bill Vananda still own and operate the cave today.

The quest for capital vexed Lost Sea Caverns for four decades. Beset by obstacles, the cave was periodically abandoned and reincarnated, before it was at last cemented in the lexicon of famous Southern attractions in the 1960s.

The first one to give it a shot was George Kyle, who bought the cave in 1915, known then as Craighead Caverns. Despite a series of seedy capers—a speakeasy, a moonshine distillery and cockfighting venue—Kyle wanted to make it a bona fide tourist attraction, encouraged by the burgeoning number of show caves across East Tennessee that had seized on the advent of the motoring tourist.

The lake hadn’t been discovered yet, but Kyle made a go of leading paying tourists by lantern light down steep steps cut into the clay to see the underground chambers.

“It just wasn’t successful,” McClung says politely.

Kyle lacked the cash to develop the cave into a better attraction, or to buy adjacent land needed to create a more accessible entrance. So he struck up a partnership with a local lawyer in nearby Sweetwater, W.E. Michael.

“He said ‘If I offer you part ownership of the cave will you come in with me and try to make an attraction out of this?’” McClung recounts.

Michael would live to regret his answer. After two years of digging and running electrical lights through the cave, a grand opening planned for July Fourth was sidelined by torrential rains that washed out the lone dirt road leading to the cave.

Before they could plan another opening, the Great Depression hit.

“They kind of gave up. They would half-heartedly do it during the summers, but they had put a ton of money into it by that time anyway,” McClung recounts.

Kyle lost his interest in the cave, leaving Michael as the sole owner. He tried various enterprises in the cave—including a mushroom farm and tavern in the 1940s—without success.

Michael tried courting other investors, and sporadically ran tours during the summers, but it never took off. The cave’s biggest fan was his own son, Van Michael, who’d followed in his father’s footsteps lawyering in Sweetwater.

When the immense underground lake that gave the Lost Sea its name was discovered in the 1950s, Van wanted to give it another shot as a tourist attraction. But his dad was done.

“His dad had been putting money into it and money into it and finally said ‘I am not putting another dime into that hole in the ground,’” McClung says.

So Van found his own investors, and began the major development of the Lost Sea, blasting a new tunnel entrance, carving out passageways and opening up the crown-jewel of the Lost Sea, the underground lake complete with a dock for boat rides, still included as part of every tour today.

“Right before the opening, they were still short quite a bit of money so they asked local people to put in money and be a stockholder,” McClung says. “At that point I think everybody in Monroe County was a stockholder.”

Over time, one of those stockholders gradually bought out all the others, and remains the owner of the Lost Sea to this day.

A single man, Leo Lambert, led to the development of three cave tourist attractions in the Chattanooga area in the 1920s and ‘30s. He was a skilled spelunker in his own right, but also a savvy businessman at turning caves into a commodity.

One of the region’s earliest show caves, Lookout Mountain Caverns, had been sealed off from the public by construction of a railroad tunnel along the face of the mountain in 1905. Two decades later, Lambert got an idea to reopen the cave, if only a new entrance could be found. He sought financial backers to drill through the mountain and create an elevator shaft into it, but in the process, he discovered a new cave altogether.

 “He crawled on his stomach for hours and was finally able to stand up,” says Meagan Jolley, spokesperson for Ruby Falls Caverns.

What he found was amazing: Ruby Falls, a 145-foot free-fall waterfall, one of the tallest free-falling underground waterfalls in the world that can be viewed by the public.

“I can’t imagine what that was like to be in a cave for 17 hours that hadn’t been discovered before and to finally hear this sound of a rushing waterfall,” Jolley says.

Lambert ran tours of both Lookout Mountain Caverns and Ruby Falls Caverns from 1930 to 1935, but with the Depression taking its toll, Lookout was closed.

Meanwhile, however, Lambert was busy opening yet a third show cave, known today at Raccoon Mountain Caverns. Ruby Falls and Raccoon Mountain remain popular tourist attractions in Chattanooga today.

Origin stories and beyond

Most commercial cave tours today are a melting pot of truth and legend, the line between myth and history blurred over the years. Many of the scripts recounted today are largely the same as they were decades ago, when the tours were developed as entertainment and stories rooted in local lore rather than written accounts.

At Bristol Caverns, Barnett says they finally abandoned a long-standing part of the tour script that claimed the cave was used as a hide-out for warring Native Americans, who would attack white settlers and retreat to the cave where they couldn’t be followed.

It probably sounded good when the cave opened to tourists in the 1940s during the heyday of cowboy and Indian pop-culture, but honestly, Barnett says there’s no evidence that happened.

“We don’t incorporate that in the tour anymore because we don’t know that. It was just a legend,” Barnett said.

A common story heard on the tour of Linville Caverns describes how fishermen found the cave in the early 1800s, after following trout upstream and seeing them disappear into the mountainside. Who knows if that’s true. Or the story of how that same stream saved the lives of two teenage boys in 1915. While exploring the cave with a single lantern, they allegedly dropped it in a pool of water and were plunged into darkness. They groped their way out by following the stream current to the opening.

Youthful boys played a hand in many of East Tennessee’s cave discoveries in the 19th and early 20th century. Boys were the first documented explorers of Raccoon Mountain Caverns near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Locals suspected there was a cave in the mountain based on cool air blowing from cracks. Farmers working in nearby fields owned by the Grand Hotel of Chattanooga allegedly cooled off by the cracks on hot days. But it took the fool-hearted bravery of two of the farmers’ sons to wriggle through the foot-wide crack. They found a gaping chamber.

Young boys playing Tom Sawyer were the first explorers to probe the depths of Tuckaleechee Caverns.

And it was a teenage boy who discovered the Lost Sea of Lost Sea Caverns. The cave was well-known to locals, but the extent of the underground lake was unknown until a local boy named Ben Sands ventured into the cave in 1905 during a severe drought. What was normally a small pool at the bottom of the cave had retreated, revealing a narrow tunnel that was normally submerged. Sands squeezed through, and emerged into a yawning chamber with water as far as his lantern’s light could cast.

“He was knee deep in water himself and all he had for a light was a lantern. He made mudballs and threw them in all directions trying to hit a wall, but all he heard was splashing,” McClung says.

Sands shared his story back above ground, but by the time some adults returned with him a couple of weeks later, it had rained heavily and the opening that Sands had squeezed through was under water once more with just a small pond visible from the main cave floor.

“He was 13 years old so they probably just thought he was exaggerating,” McClung surmises.

For three decades—from the 1920s to 1940s—the caves’ owners tried but failed to make it a tourist attraction. It wasn’t until the 1950s that Sands was vindicated by the rediscovery of the underground lake, at last setting the stage for the Lost Sea to become one of the South’s premier attractions.

“They knew the water was down there and had heard rumors there was a huge body of water but it was a mystery to them. They had no idea the extent of what was down under there,” McClung says.

In fact, they still don’t. A team of cave divers and scientists probed the underwater passageways leading out from the main lake body in the 1970s. But, the exploration was fraught with danger. Bubbles from the divers tank continually dislodged slabs of overhead rock from the ceilings of underground passageways, threatening to pin and trap the divers as they probed deeper into the offshoot from the main lake. After a week of surveying passageways, finding no end in sight with their sonar readings, the exploration was abandoned and the end of the lake never found.

Like other caves with eureka moments in their history of discovery, Raccoon Mountain had been operating as a tourist attraction for two decades without realizing even bigger and better chambers lay just on the other side of the cave walls. In the 1950s, the Smith brothers who owned Raccoon Mountain Caverns at the time decided to go exploring into unchartered territory. They squeezed through a dangerously tight 7-inch gap. With their head turned sideways and their arms stretched above them, they exhaled to make their rib cage narrower and pushed and pulled each other to get through.

“Any time you have to breathe out to fit through, that’s actually unsafe caving practice,” says Devin McGinty, the cave curator for Raccoon Mountain and an expert spelunker.

But they made it, and discovered a new large chamber that doubled the length of their cave tours after being blasted open.

Cave exploration can be a never-ending proposition. The labyrinth-like crevices twist and dive for miles underground, splintering off like fractals in seemingly every direction.

“Just because you physically can’t fit somewhere doesn’t mean the cave doesn’t continue. You don’t know that’s the end of it,” says McGinty, the cave curator for Raccoon Mountain Caverns. “It’s just the point where people said ‘We have been in here a long time and need to head back.’”

McGinty has undertaken numerous spelunking expeditions to map the uncharted passageways at Raccoon Mountain Caverns. It’s a dream come true for a cave scientist—he holds a masters in karst geomorphology. On each mapping expedition, it takes hours to get to the furthest extent of the known cave reaches before the new exploration can begin.

“You have a minimum of a day’s work to get a point you already know exists and then push beyond that,” McGinty says. “There is a lot out there. It is just a matter of finding it.”

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Just a ‘niter mine

The caves of East Tennessee played a little-known but critical role in American military history throughout the 19th century.

During the War of 1812 and the Civil War, caves across East Tennessee were mined extensively for salt peter, the key ingredient in gun powder.

The earliest salt peter mine and gunpowder mill in East Tennessee dates to 1777, run by a woman named Mary Patton who learned the art of making gunpowder from her father in England. Patton provided 500 pounds of gunpowder to the Overmountain militia men who mustered for the Battle of King’s Mountain, a decisive turning point in the Revolutionary War.

The salt peter industry ebbed and flowed with war time. During the Civil War, the Confederacy created an official niter bureau, deploying survey teams to systematically scout the countryside for caves with the coveted compound and conscripted local men into mining it, with some operations numbering 200 or more. Enterprising families worked their own caves on a smaller scale. Niter bureau posts were set up in towns across East Tennessee to buy all the processed salt peter they could get, for as much as $1 a pound.

“During the Civil War, the Confederacy really needed gunpowder. Their best source was the caves of the Appalachians,” says Dr. Joe Douglas. “The Confederacy published a booklet explaining ‘here is how you mine salt peter and here is how you make it.’”

Harvesting salt peter from caves was a labor-intensive process. Dirt from cave floors was leached in large wooden troughs to extract calcium nitrate. The residue was leached again through a vat of ashes, rendering it into potassium nitrate. It was then boiled to produce niter crystals, which were sold and crushed at gun powder mills.