Fantastic Caverns, A Cave That Cars Can Drive Through

North of Springfield, beneath a gentle Ozark hillside, there is a limestone cave that a farmer named John Knox found in eighteen sixty-two with the help of his hunting dog. He kept it quiet until eighteen sixty-seven, when a group of Springfield women were among the first to explore it. The cave was known by other names before it became Fantastic Caverns in the nineteen fifties, and its commercial history is tangled with the broader story of Ozark tourism.

The cave now known as Fantastic Caverns has one distinction that sets it apart from almost every other show cave in the country: visitors do not walk through it. They ride. Jeep-drawn trams carry visitors through passages wide enough and tall enough that the vehicles move comfortably through the cave's main chambers without scraping stone.

It is the only ride-through cave in North America, as far as the management and the regional tourism literature are concerned, and that distinction is itself a piece of Ozark marketing genius. The geology underneath Springfield and the surrounding Ozarks is karst country, riddled with cave systems formed as mildly acidic groundwater dissolved the underlying limestone over millions of years. Fantastic Caverns is a large and accessible example of a much larger underground landscape.

The cave maintains a constant temperature of roughly sixty degrees Fahrenheit year-round, which in a Missouri summer is a significant selling point. The history of the cave as a tourist attraction tracks the history of automobile tourism in America. The Ozarks became accessible to visitors as roads improved, and places like Fantastic Caverns became fixed points on the regional tourist itinerary, stops that appeared in travel writing and roadside guides for decades.