Cave City: Gateway to the Cave Wars

Cave City has been drawing travelers since the eighteen hundreds, when visitors rode stagecoaches through these Kentucky hills to reach Mammoth Cave. The Louisville and Nashville Railroad arrived in eighteen fifty-nine, and tourism boomed. By the nineteen twenties the road from Cave City to the cave was lined with rival information booths, each manned by hustlers trying to steer visitors toward competing caverns.

The resulting chaos became known as the Kentucky Cave Wars, a cutthroat era of misleading road signs and hustlers who told tourists the cave was closed. The fighting was so fierce it helped push Congress to authorize Mammoth Cave National Park in nineteen twenty-six, and it was established in nineteen forty-one, putting the showmanship under federal control. Cave City still serves as the main gateway town, and the cave itself draws well over half a million visitors a year.