Graham Cave, Missouri

This sandstone cave above the Loutre River in Montgomery County, Missouri, sheltered people from as early as ten thousand years ago, making it an important early site in the American Midwest. Its broad entrance arch, a hundred and twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high, offered protection at the end of the Ice Age, when hunters tracked now-extinct megafauna across a landscape nothing like today's Missouri. The University of Missouri and the Missouri Archaeological Society excavated here between nineteen forty-nine and nineteen sixty-one, recovering artifacts from the ancient Dalton and Archaic periods that were datable by radiocarbon.

In nineteen sixty-one, Graham Cave became the very first archaeological site in the United States to be designated a National Historic Landmark. Frances Graham Darnell donated the land to Missouri three years later; it is now Graham Cave State Park.