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54-516: Nearby attractions include Mammoth Cave National Park , Nolin Lake State Park , Moutardier Resort and Marina, Ponderosa Boat Dock/Marina and Wax Marina. Moutardier is an unincorporated community that abuts Nolin River Lake. Moutardier is located on Kentucky Route 259 , 10.3 miles (16.6 km) south-southeast of Leitchfield . This Edmonson County, Kentucky state location article

108-537: A layer of sandstone , which has made the system remarkably stable. It is known to include more than 400 miles (640 km) of passageway. New discoveries and connections add several miles/kilometers to this figure each year. The upper sandstone member is known as the Big Clifty Sandstone . Thin, sparse layers of limestone interspersed within the sandstone give rise to an epikarstic zone , in which tiny conduits (cave passages too small to enter) are dissolved by

162-600: A number of entrances to Mammoth Cave on land not owned by the Croghan Estate. Absent the data from the Croghan's secretive surveys, performed by Kämper, Bishop, and others, which had not been published in a form suitable for determining the geographic extent of the cave, it was now conclusively shown that the Croghans had been for years exhibiting portions of Mammoth Cave which were not under land they owned. Lawsuits were filed and, for

216-475: A period of bitter competition between local cave owners for tourist money. Broad tactics of deception were used to lure visitors away from their intended destination to other private show caves. Misleading signs were placed along the roads leading to the Mammoth Cave. A typical strategy during the early days of automobile travel involved representatives (known as "cappers") of other private show caves hopping aboard

270-692: A photographer from Cincinnati, Ohio, using a very dangerous method of flash photography called magnesium flash photography. Throughout the 19th century, the fame of Mammoth Cave would grow so that the cave became an international sensation. At the same time, the cave attracted the attention of 19th century writers such as Robert Montgomery Bird , the Rev. Robert Davidson, the Rev. Horace Martin, Alexander Clark Bullitt, Nathaniel Parker Willis (who visited in June 1852), Bayard Taylor (in May 1855), William Stump Forwood (in spring 1867),

324-415: A rock onto his leg while in a tight crawlway and was unable to be rescued before dying of starvation. Attempts to rescue Collins created a mass media sensation ; the resulting publicity would draw prominent Kentuckians to initiate a movement which would result in the formation of Mammoth Cave National Park in 1941. As the last of the Croghan heirs died, advocacy grew among wealthy citizens of Kentucky for

378-526: A time, different entrances to the cave were operated in direct competition with each other. In the early 20th century, Floyd Collins spent ten years exploring the Flint Ridge Cave System (the most important legacy of these explorations was his discovery of Floyd Collins' Crystal Cave and exploration in Salts Cave) before dying at Sand Cave, Kentucky, in 1925. While exploring Sand Cave, he dislodged

432-452: A tourist's car's running board, and leading the passengers to believe that Mammoth Cave was closed, quarantined, caved in or otherwise inaccessible. In 1906, Mammoth Cave became accessible by steamboat with the construction of a lock and dam at Brownsville, Kentucky . In 1908, Max Kämper , a young German mining engineer, arrived at the cave by way of New York. Kämper had just graduated from technical college and his family had sent him on

486-419: A trip abroad as a graduation present. Originally intending to spend two weeks at Mammoth Cave, Kämper spent several months. With the assistance of Ed Bishop, a Mammoth Cave Guide, Kämper produced a remarkably accurate instrumental survey of many kilometers of Mammoth Cave, including many new discoveries. Reportedly, Kämper also produced a corresponding survey of the land surface overlying the cave: this information

540-577: Is a national park of the United States in south-central Kentucky . It encompasses portions of Mammoth Cave, the longest known cave system in the world . The park's 52,830 acres (21,380 ha) are located primarily in Edmonson County , with small areas extending eastward into Hart and Barren counties. The Green River runs through the park, with a tributary called the Nolin River feeding into

594-505: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Grayson County, Kentucky state location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Hart County, Kentucky state location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article related to a protected area in Kentucky is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Mammoth Cave National Park Mammoth Cave National Park

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648-413: Is also found in salt domes and on the top of mesa formations. In the petroleum industry , caprock is any nonpermeable formation that may trap oil, gas or water, preventing it from migrating to the surface. This caprock can prevent hydrocarbons from migrating to the surface, allowing them to accumulate in a reservoir of oil, gas and water. These structures, also known as petroleum traps , are

702-412: Is relatively hard for water to penetrate: the exceptions are where vertical cracks occur. This protective layer means that many of the older, upper passages of the cave system are very dry, with no stalactites , stalagmites , or other formations which require flowing or dripping water to develop. However, the sandstone caprock layer has been dissolved and eroded at many locations within the park, such as

756-506: Is to preserve, protect, interpret, and study the internationally recognized biological and geologic features and processes associated with the longest known cave system in the world, the park’s diverse forested karst landscape, the Green and Nolin rivers, and extensive evidence of human history; and to provide and promote public enjoyment, recreation, and understanding. Mammoth Cave developed in thick Mississippian -aged limestone strata capped by

810-562: The War of 1812 , when Mammoth Cave's saltpeter reserves became significant due to the Jefferson Embargo Act of 1807 which prohibited all foreign trade. The blockade starved the American military of saltpeter and therefore gunpowder . As a result, the domestic price of saltpeter rose and production based on nitrates extracted from caves such as Mammoth Cave became more lucrative. In July 1812,

864-534: The War of 1812 . Legend has it that the first European to visit Mammoth Cave was either John Houchin or his brother Francis Houchin, in 1797. While hunting, Houchin pursued a wounded bear to the cave's large entrance opening near the Green River. Some Houchin Family tales have John Decatur "Johnny Dick" Houchin as the discoverer of the cave, but this is highly unlikely because Johnny Dick was only 10 years old in 1797 and

918-579: The "Pollard Survey" was sold by indenture on September 10, 1791. in Philadelphia by William Pollard. 19,897 acres (8,052 ha) of the "Pollard Survey" between the North bank of Bacon Creek and the Green River were purchased by Thomas Lang, Jr. , a British-American merchant from Yorkshire , England, on June 3, 1796, for £4,116/13s/0d (£4,116.65). The land was lost to a local county tax claim during

972-475: The Frozen Niagara room. The contact between limestone and sandstone can be found by hiking from the valley bottoms to the ridgetops: typically, as one approaches the top of a ridge, one sees the outcrops of exposed rock change in composition from limestone to sandstone at a well-defined elevation. At one valley bottom in the southern region of the park, a massive sinkhole has developed. Known as Cedar Sink ,

1026-407: The Frozen Niagara tour. By 1954, Mammoth Cave National Park's land holdings encompassed all lands within its outer boundary with the exception of two privately held tracts. One of these, the old Lee Collins farm, had been sold to Harry Thomas of Horse Cave, Kentucky, whose grandson, William "Bill" Austin, operated Collins Crystal Cave as a show cave in direct competition with the national park, which

1080-506: The Green just inside the park. The cave system has formally been known as the Mammoth–Flint Ridge Cave System since 1972, when a connection was discovered between Mammoth Cave and the even longer system under Flint Ridge to the north. As of 2022, more than 426 miles (686 km) of passageways had been surveyed, over 1.5 times longer than the second-longest cave system, Mexico 's Sac Actun underwater cave. The park

1134-548: The Mammoth Cave Estate, including Bishop and its other slaves from their previous owner, Franklin Gorin. Croghan briefly ran an ill-fated tuberculosis hospital in the cave in 1842–43, the vapors of which he believed would cure his patients. A widespread epidemic of the period, tuberculosis would ultimately claim the life of Dr. Croghan in 1849. In 1866, the first photos from within the Mammoth Cave were taken by Charles Waldack,

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1188-587: The Secretary of the Interior. The area was declared a national park on July 1, 1941, when the minimum of 45,310 acres (18,340 ha) (over 600 parcels) had been assembled." Superintendent Hoskins later wrote of a summer tanager named Pete who arrived at the guide house on or around every April 20, starting in 1938. The bird ate from food held in the hands of the guides, to the delight of visitors, and provided food to his less-tame mate. Mammoth Cave National Park

1242-418: The age of the specimens. An analysis of their content, also pioneered by Watson, allows determination of the relative content of plant and meat in the diet of either culture over a period spanning several thousand years. This analysis indicates a timed transition from a hunter-gatherer culture to plant domestication and agriculture . Another technique employed in archaeological research , at Mammoth Cave,

1296-450: The bend in the Green River known as the Turnhole, which is less than a mile from the main entrance of Mammoth Cave. The land containing this historic entrance was first surveyed and registered in 1798 under the name of Valentine Simons. Simons began exploiting Mammoth Cave for its saltpeter reserves. In partnership with Valentine Simon, various other individuals would own the land through

1350-485: The bottom of Gorin's Dome to my knowledge." "After Stephen crossed the Bottomless Pit, we discovered all that part of the cave now known beyond that point. Previous to those discoveries, all interest centered in what is known as the 'Old Cave' ... but now many of the points are but little known, although as Stephen was wont to say, they were 'grand, gloomy and peculiar'." In 1839, John Croghan of Louisville bought

1404-419: The caprock is the riverbed above the falls, and is what prevents the river from eroding the face of the falls very quickly. The Niagara caprock is made of dolomitic limestone . Other common types of caprock are sandstone and mafic rock . In processes such as scarp retreat , the caprock controls the rate of erosion of the scarp. As the softer rock is cut away, periodically the caprock shears off. Caprock

1458-486: The cave was purchased from Simon and other owners by Charles Wilkins and an investor from Philadelphia named Hyman Gratz. Soon the cave was being mined for calcium nitrate on an industrial scale, utilizing a labor force of 70 slaves to build and operate the soil leaching apparatus, as well as to haul the raw soil from deep in the cave to the central processing site. A half-interest in the cave changed hands for ten thousand dollars (equivalent to over $ 150,000 in 2020). After

1512-418: The cave, and named many of the cave's features. Stephen Bishop was introduced to Mammoth Cave in 1838 by Franklin Gorin. Gorin wrote, after Bishop's death: "I placed a guide in the cave – the celebrated and great Stephen, and he aided in making the discoveries. He was the first person who ever crossed the Bottomless Pit, and he, myself and another person whose name I have forgotten were the only persons ever at

1566-420: The caves are protected by various federal and state laws. One of the most basic facts to be determined about a newly discovered artifact is its precise location and situation. Even slightly moving a prehistoric artifact contaminates it from a research perspective. Explorers are properly trained not to disturb archaeological evidence, and some areas of the cave remain out-of-bounds for even seasoned explorers, unless

1620-400: The caves. Two chambers in the caves have since been known as "Booth's Amphitheatre" and "Ole Bull's Concert Hall". The difficulties of farming life in the hardscrabble, poor soil of the cave-country influenced local owners of smaller nearby caves to see opportunities for commercial exploitation, particularly given the success of Mammoth Cave as a tourist attraction. The "Kentucky Cave Wars" was

1674-535: The electric-lit routes. Several "wild" tours venture away from the developed parts of the cave into muddy crawls and dusty tunnels. The Echo River Tour, one of the cave's most famous attractions, took visitors on a boat ride along an underground river. The tour was discontinued for logistic and environmental reasons in the early 1990s. Mammoth Cave headquarters and visitor center is located on Mammoth Cave Parkway . The park can be accessed directly from I-65 at Exit 48. The parkway connects with Kentucky Route 70 from

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1728-720: The establishment of Mammoth Cave National Park. Private citizens formed the Mammoth Cave National Park Association in 1924. The park was authorized May 25, 1926. Donated funds were used to purchase some farmsteads in the region, while other tracts within the proposed national park boundary were acquired by right of eminent domain . Unlike national parks in the sparsely populated American West, thousands of people were forced to move to form Mammoth Cave National Park. Eminent domain proceedings were often bitter, with landowners paid what were considered to be inadequate sums. The resulting acrimony still resonates within

1782-831: The human-explorable caves of the region have naturally developed. The limestone layers of the stratigraphic column beneath the Big Clifty, in increasing order of depth below the ridgetops, are the Girkin Formation , the Ste. Genevieve Limestone , and the St. Louis Limestone . The large Main Cave passage seen on the Historic Tour is located at the bottom of the Girkin and the top of the Ste. Genevieve Formation. Each of

1836-421: The natural acidity of groundwater. The epikarstic zone concentrates local flows of runoff into high-elevation springs which emerge at the edges of ridges. The resurgent water from these springs typically flows briefly on the surface before sinking underground again at the elevation of contact between the sandstone caprock and the underlying massive limestones. It is in these underlying massive limestone layers that

1890-460: The naturalist John Muir (early September 1867), the Rev. Horace Carter Hovey, and others. As a result of the growing renown of Mammoth Cave, the cave boasted famous visitors such as actor Edwin Booth (his brother, John Wilkes Booth , assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865), singer Jenny Lind (who visited the cave on April 5, 1851), and violinist Ole Bull who together gave a concert in one of

1944-448: The north and Kentucky Route 255 from the south within the park. Human activity in Mammoth Cave traces back five thousand years. Several sets of Native American remains have been recovered from Mammoth Cave, or other nearby caves in the region, in both the 19th and 20th centuries. Most were mummies , representing examples of intentional burial, with ample evidence of pre-Columbian funerary practice. An exception to purposeful burial

1998-451: The point of the 1906 construction of the dam at Brownsville, pointing out that this made a full hydrologic study of the cave impossible. Among his precise descriptions of the hydrogeologic setting of Mammoth Cave, Martel offered the speculative conclusion that Mammoth Cave was connected to Salts and Colossal Caves : this would not be proven correct until 60 years after Martel's visit. In the early 1920s, George Morrison created, via blasting,

2052-415: The primary layers of limestone is divided further into named geological units and sub-units. One area of cave research involves correlating the stratigraphy with the cave survey produced by explorers. This makes it possible to produce approximate three-dimensional maps of the contours of the various layer boundaries without the necessity for test wells and extracting core samples. The upper sandstone caprock

2106-458: The public display of Native American remains. Research beginning in the late 1950s led by Patty Jo Watson , of Washington University in St. Louis has done much to illuminate the lives of the late Archaic and early Woodland peoples who explored and exploited caves in the region. Preserved by the constant cave environment, dietary evidence yielded carbon dates enabling Watson and others to determine

2160-620: The publication of a double first-person account of the expedition, The Caves Beyond: The Story of the Collins Crystal Cave Expedition by Joe Lawrence, Jr. (then president of the National Speleological Society) and Roger Brucker . The expedition proved conclusively that passages in Crystal Cave extended toward Mammoth Cave proper, at least exceeding the Crystal Cave property boundaries. However, this information

2214-482: The region. For legal reasons, the federal government was prohibited from restoring or developing the cleared farmsteads while the private Association held the land: this regulation was evaded by the operation of "a maximum of four" CCC camps from May 22, 1933 to July 1942. According to the National Park Service, "By May 22, 1936, 27,402 acres (11,089 ha) of land had been acquired and accepted by

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2268-430: The saltpeter market. Gorin was a slave owner, and used his slaves as tour guides. Stephen Bishop was one of these slaves and would make a number of important contributions to human knowledge of the cave, becoming one of Mammoth Cave's most celebrated historical figures. Stephen Bishop , an African-American slave and a guide to the cave during the 1840s and 1850s, was one of the first people to make extensive maps of

2322-423: The sinkhole features a small river entering one side and disappearing back underground at the other side. The National Park Service offers several cave tours to visitors. Some notable features of the cave, such as Grand Avenue, Frozen Niagara, and Fat Man's Misery, can be seen on lighted tours ranging from one to six hours in length. Two tours, lit only by visitor-carried paraffin lamps, are popular alternatives to

2376-570: The subject of the trip is archaeological research on that area. Besides the remains that have been discovered in the portion of the cave accessible through the historic entrance of Mammoth Cave, the remains of cane torches used by Native Americans as well as other artifacts such as drawings, gourd fragments, and woven grass moccasin slippers are found in the Salts Cave section of the system in Flint Ridge. The 31,000-acre (13,000 ha) tract known as

2430-479: The war when prices fell, the workings were abandoned and it became a minor tourist attraction centering on a Native American mummy discovered nearby. When Wilkins died his estate's executors sold his interest in the cave to Gratz. In the spring of 1838, the cave was sold by the Gratz brothers to Franklin Gorin, who intended to operate Mammoth Cave purely as a tourist attraction, the bottom long having since fallen out of

2484-420: Was " experimental archaeology " in which modern explorers were sent into the cave using the same technology as that employed by the ancient cultures whose leftover implements lie discarded in many parts of the cave. The goal was to gain insight into the problems faced by the ancient people who explored the cave, by placing the researchers in a similar physical situation. Ancient human remains and artifacts within

2538-438: Was closely held by the explorers: it was feared that the National Park Service might forbid exploration were this known. Caprock Caprock or cap rock is a more resistant rock type overlying a less resistant rock type, analogous to an upper crust on a cake that is harder than the underlying layer. The Niagara Escarpment , over which Niagara Falls flows, is an example of a scarp or escarpment . At Niagara Falls,

2592-475: Was dedicated on July 1, 1941. The same year saw the incorporation of the National Speleological Society . R. Taylor Hoskins, the second Acting Superintendent under the old Association, became the first official Superintendent, a position he held until 1951. The New Entrance, closed to visitors since 1941, was reopened on December 26, 1951, becoming the entrance used for the beginning of

2646-460: Was discovered when in 1935 the remains of an adult male were found under a large boulder. The boulder had shifted and settled onto the victim, a pre-Columbian miner, who had disturbed the rubble supporting it. The remains of the ancient victim were named "Lost John" and exhibited to the public into the 1970s, when they were interred in a secret location in Mammoth Cave for reasons of preservation as well as emerging political sensitivities with respect to

2700-432: Was established as a national park on July 1, 1941, after oft-contentious eminent domain proceedings whose consequences still affect the region. It was named a World Heritage Site on October 27, 1981; an international Biosphere Reserve on September 26, 1990; and an International Dark Sky Park on October 28, 2021. The park's mission is stated in its foundation document: The purpose of Mammoth Cave National Park

2754-473: Was forced to maintain roads leading to the property. In February 1954, a two-week expedition under the auspices of the National Speleological Society was organized at the invitation of Austin: this expedition became known as C-3, or the Collins Crystal Cave Expedition. The C-3 expedition drew public interest, first from a photo essay published by Robert Halmi in the July 1954 issue of True Magazine and later from

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2808-480: Was the man who shot that bear and chased it into the cave. The shadow over Charles's claim is the fact that he was residing in Illinois until 1801. Contrary to this story is Brucker and Watson's The Longest Cave , which asserts that the cave was "certainly known before that time." Caves in the area were known before the discovery of the entrance to Mammoth Cave. Even Francis Houchin had a cave entrance on his land very near

2862-551: Was to be useful in the opening of other entrances to the cave, as soon happened with the Violet City entrance. The Croghan family suppressed the topographic element of Kämper's map, and it is not known to survive today, although the cave map portion of Kämper's work stands as a triumph of accurate cave cartography: not until the early 1960s and the advent of the modern exploration period would these passages be surveyed and mapped with greater accuracy. Kämper returned to Berlin, and from

2916-406: Was unlikely to be out hunting bears at such an age. His father John is the more likely candidate from that branch of the family tree, but the most probable candidate for discoverer of Mammoth Cave is Francis "Frank" Houchin, whose land was much closer to the cave entrance than his brother John's. There is also the argument that their brother Charles Houchin, who was known as a great hunter and trapper,

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