How a National Park Was Made

Mammoth Cave became a national park on the first of July, nineteen forty-one, but the road to get there was long and often bitter. To assemble the park, the state and federal government had to pull together more than six hundred parcels of private land, over forty-five thousand acres. Much of it was bought willingly, but a great deal was taken through eminent domain, and thousands of people were forced to leave homes and farms their families had worked for generations.

Many landowners felt they were paid far too little for the ground beneath their feet. Whole communities, churches, schools, and cemeteries were emptied and left behind. Through the nineteen thirties, the Civilian Conservation Corps ran several camps here, tearing down the abandoned farmsteads, planting trees to naturalize the cleared land, and building roads and trails both above ground and inside the cave itself.

Out of that difficult, contested transformation came the park you can visit today, more than fifty thousand acres of forested karst that a global body later named a World Heritage Site for its geology and an international biosphere reserve for its living diversity.