Howe Caverns, One Hundred and Fifty-Six Feet Below the Schoharie Valley

In the summer of eighteen forty-two, a farmer named Lester Howe noticed that his cows were gathering around a particular spot in a field in Schoharie County. They kept returning to it on hot days. He investigated and found cool air rising from a crevice in the rock. He came back with a lantern and went down.

What he found beneath his field was a cave system that extended more than a mile through limestone carved by water over twelve thousand years. The main chambers dropped one hundred fifty-six feet below the surface. One of them contained an underground lake that could be navigated by rowboat. The formations were intact: stalactites hanging from ceilings, columns built up from the floor where dripping calcite had accumulated across millennia.

Howe opened the cave to paying visitors in eighteen forty-three, the year after he discovered it. Howe's commercial venture eventually failed, and the cave closed to the public until new owners reopened it in nineteen twenty-nine with electric lights and walkways. The operation born that year has run ever since, making it one of the longest-running tourist attractions in New York State. The boat ride on the underground lake, added when the attraction was rebuilt for visitors in the twentieth century, is substantially the same ride today. The lake is the same lake. The formations grew at a rate of roughly one cubic inch per century, which means the column that took a hundred years to form was not there when the glaciers retreated.

The Schoharie Valley above Howe Caverns is ordinary farm country, rolling fields and old barns. One hundred fifty-six feet beneath it, the river that carved the cave is still flowing, still dissolving, still adding one cubic inch to what it left behind.