Lost River Cave: Ten Thousand Years Underground
Near Bowling Green, Kentucky
Just west of downtown Bowling Green, a river disappears. The Lost River flows for roughly four hundred feet at the surface, then sinks into the limestone and travels for miles through underground passages before emerging again. Archaeologists have found evidence of human use at the cave entrance going back approximately ten thousand years, to the time when Paleo-Indian peoples first occupied this part of the continent.
A stone tool called a Dalton point, dated to around eight thousand years ago, was discovered at the site. The cave offered shelter, water, and a constant temperature year-round, and people came back to it for millennia before any European settler knew the place existed. The first European-American mill at the cave's mouth was operating by around seventeen ninety-two, powered by the underground river.
By the eighteen twenties the mill operation was well established. The final mill was destroyed by fire in nineteen fifteen. During the Civil War, Confederate forces used the valley from September of eighteen sixty-one through February of eighteen sixty-two, and Union forces occupied it afterward, with records suggesting nearly forty thousand soldiers were at various points stationed in the vicinity.
The cave's most unexpected chapter came in the nineteen thirties, when a man named Jimmy Stewart opened the Cavern Nite Club inside the cave entrance in nineteen thirty-four. Billboard Magazine named it the only air-conditioned nightclub in the United States in nineteen thirty-nine. The club operated until nineteen sixty-two, when it closed and the cave fell into neglect.
Western Kentucky University and a conservation nonprofit acquired the property, and after restoration efforts the cave reopened to the public in nineteen ninety-seven. It offers underground boat tours today.
