Inside Mammoth Cave on the Grand Historic Tour

---

For reviews of all Mammoth Cave National Park tours, how to get tickets, what to wear, and rules for the tours, see the Cave Tours web page here on National Park Planner. Keep in mind that not all tours are offered year-round, and the schedule of what tours are available changes often. Be sure to check the National Park Service’s official Cave Tours web page for the current schedule.

---

OVERVIEW

The Grand Historic Tour is the best and the most thorough of the history-based tours of Mammoth Cave. It is the historic tour that I recommend the most, but it is not for everyone. It is four hours long and covers four miles, and in truth, four hours is a long time to spend walking and standing inside a cave. It is definitely not for young children or anyone else with a short attention span. Nor is it for those who need to sit down often. Participants should be in good physical condition, like history, and can mentally handle a long tour. If the Grand Historic Tour sounds like it is too much for you, try the Extended Historic Tour or the Historic Tour. Everyone who visits Mammoth Cave National Park should take one of these history-based tours.

Like all tours that enter Mammoth Cave through the Historic Entrance, the Grand Historic Tour starts off down a steep, .2-mile paved hill from the Visitor Center. It is even steeper on the way up, believe me. For a young person or those in great shape, the hill is probably inconsequential. But for those who are older, drastically overweight, or have problems walking up or down steep hills, it’s no picnic. At 59 years old, I dreaded the walk back up to the Visitor Center far more than anything inside the cave, including the hundreds of stairs that must be tackled on some of the tours. There are benches along the path, and there is no shame in sitting down and resting. I will say that if you get to the bottom and realize that getting back up to the Visitor Center is going to be extremely difficult, you should not be going into the cave in the first place.

Walking up from the Historic Entrance of Mammoth Cave to the Visitor Center

Many tours of Mammoth Cave have overlapping routes, some to the extent that they are complete duplicates of other tours. If you take the Grand Historic Tour, you definitely do not need to take the Extended Historic Tour, the Historic Tour, the River Styx Tour, or the Gothic Avenue Tour. The Grand Historic Tour does visit the Star Chamber, but the Star Chamber Lantern Tour is worth double dipping because you get to see the cave by lantern light just like the early tourists who came to Mammoth Cave. I personally recommend the Violet City Lantern Tour over the Star Chamber Lantern Tour, but it is very strenuous and not well suited for children, the elderly, or those who are really out of shape or who have mobility problems. Regardless of which you choose, everyone should take at least one lantern tour during their visit to Mammoth Cave National Park.

TOUR HIGHLIGHTS

Saltpeter Mine

All tours that enter Mammoth Cave through the Historic Entrance pass the remnants of a saltpeter mining operation, though only the history-oriented tours stop to talk about it.

Saltpeter (aka potassium nitrate) is used to make a variety of products, but in the early 1800s it was extremely important for the production of black powder. Output was ramped up once the War of 1812 started, and the mine owners made a lot of money. However, it was overproduced, and when the war ended in February 1815, prices for black powder fell from 97¢ per pound to 7¢, and the mines were shut down. This eventually led to the Mammoth Cave owners turning to tourism to make money. The earliest known cave tours started in 1816.

Potassium nitrate can be produced in a number of ways. One is by extracting calcium nitrate from bat guano (poop), which is commonly found in abundance in the dirt of a cave floor. To do this, the cave dirt is shoveled into large wooden vats. Water, which is brought down from the surface through wooden pipes, is added. After a week of soaking, a slurry forms, and this is pumped back to the surface where it is boiled until the nitrates crystalize and separate from the sludge. Materials high in potassium, such as wood ash or charcoal, are then mixed in with the nitrate to make saltpeter. In the early 1800s, most saltpeter mines shipped their product to the Dupont Company in Delaware where it was turned into gunpowder.

Remnants of the wooden vats and the pipes that once carried water between the surface and the cave floor are still standing inside Mammoth Cave. These artifacts are now over 200 years old, all preserved due to the low temperatures and low humidity of the cave.

Remnants of wooden water pipes used in the Mammoth Cave saltpeter mine

Remnants of wooden vats used to hold cave dirt in the Mammoth Cave saltpeter mining operation

Most of the work was done by slaves. A diorama of the saltpeter operation at Mammoth Cave is on display in the Visitor Center museum, and this accurately depicts the use of slave labor.

Diorama of a saltpeter mining operation on display inside the Mammoth Cave Visitor Center

Methodist Church

The Methodist Church is a stop on many of the Mammoth Cave tours. It gets its name from the Reverend George Gatewood, a Methodist preacher who supposedly held church services at this location in the 1830s, preaching from a rock ledge above the cave floor called Pulpit Rock. Before service began, all lanterns were collected to light the pulpit. Without a lantern, nobody could leave. Gatewood is known to have preached for up to six hours.

Pulpit Rock at the Methodist Church inside Mammoth Cave

Gothic Avenue

Just past the Methodist Church is a staircase that leads to Gothic Avenue. The entrance is called Booth’s Amphitheater, named after Edwin Booth, brother of Abraham Lincoln’s murderer, John Wilkes Booth. All of the Booth’s were famous actors, and supposedly Edwin recited a few passages from Hamlet at the Gothic Avenue entrance when egged on by the crowd during a visit in 1876.

Entrance to Gothic Avenue inside Mammoth Cave

Mammoth Cave’s Gothic Avenue

Gothic Avenue gets its name from rock formations that resemble Gothic architecture. It is one of the few places in Mammoth Cave with stalactite and stalagmite formations that are visited on tours that start at the Historic Entrance. However, its most interesting feature is its graffiti-covered ceilings. In the early to mid-1800s, tour guides, who were often slaves, had various ways of making money. One was to allow visitors to write their names on the ceiling of the cave. This was done by using tallow (animal-fat) candles that created a lot of black, greasy smoke. The candles were attached to long poles, and the people writing their names did so by creating a series of black dots. The earliest signatures on the ceilings or walls using the candle technique are from 1811. There is supposedly a signature scratched into a rock from 1798. It is estimated that there are at least 10,000 signatures in the cave.

Graffiti-covered ceiling of Gothic Avenue inside Mammoth Cave

Graffiti-covered ceiling of Gothic Avenue inside Mammoth Cave

Graffiti on the walls of Gothic Avenue inside Mammoth Cave

Because the candle wax would drip into the face of the person doing the writing when looking up at the ceiling, a mirror was placed at the person’s feet. Of course, if looking in a mirror, the writer had to create letters in reverse in order for the signature to be correct on the ceiling. Not everyone realized this, and there are more than a few signatures that are backwards. A slave guide who could not read or write might not have any idea that the person was creating letters backwards and would thus never say anything. Either that or he just didn’t care. Once the mistake was realized, the guide could sell the author another candle.

Backwards signature on the ceiling of Mammoth Cave’s Gothic Avenue

In 1888, signatures were outlawed in Mammoth Cave by a Kentucky state law. Defacing the cave was a $50 fine. Guides, of course, found other ways to make money. In addition to providing tours, they were responsible for creating the tour routes and clearing the rocks along the path. As the story goes, the guides started charging visitors to take the rocks and stack them into large piles to create what became known as monuments, effectively having guests pay them to do their work. Guests could write their names or anything else on the rocks. As word spread about building monuments, groups began coming to the cave with signs already made for the occasion. There are monuments to states, cities, colleges, fraternities and sororities, and individuals, and many of these still stand today. The largest, the Kentucky Monument, reaches the ceiling. At one time there was a monument for every state in the United States.

Kentucky Monument in Mammoth Cave’s Gothic Avenue

Gothic Avenue is a rather short passageway, and towards the end is one of its most famous calcite formations, the Bridal Alter. There have been at least a dozen weddings held here (none in modern times). The Bridal Alter is a completed formation, meaning that it is no longer growing.

Gothic Avenue’s Bridal Alter, Mammoth Cave National Park

Speleothems, the collective name for stalactites, stalagmites, and other calcite formations most people associate with a cave, require slow, dripping water to form. A cap of sandstone covers most of Mammoth Cave, keeping water out, which is why there are so few speleothems. However, cracks do occur and water does sometimes get in. Not far from the Bridal Alter is an active formation that grows about one cubic inch every three to four hundred years.

Stalactite formation in Mammoth Cave’s Gothic Avenue

One other famous formation in Gothic Avenue is what is known as a column: a stalactite and a stalagmite that grew together. Known as the Devil’s Armchair, the formation has a hole in the center that is big enough for a person to sit down in. In 1851, the world’s most famous opera singer, Jenny Lind, visited Mammoth Cave during a concert tour of the United States. She supposedly sat in the formation, and the name was quickly changed to Jenny Lind’s Armchair. The formation was also featured in an 1893 Pabst beer advertisement.

Jenny Lind’s Armchair in Mammoth Cave’s Gothic Avenue

Giant’s Coffin

Gothic Avenue ends at Lover’s Leap, a dark chasm, and at that point the Grand Historic Tour returns to the main passageway of Mammoth Cave and continues heading farther away from the Historic Entrance until coming to a large slab of rock known as the Giant’s Coffin. Most tours of the Main Cave pass this point. The slab is 40 feet long and 20 feet tall, and it fell from the ceiling above. If it were possible to lift it up, it could be matched to the exact spot where it was originally located.

The slab was first called Steamboat Rock, but by the 1850s guides were calling it the Giant’s Coffin because the name was more theatrical, and theatrics sold cave tour tickets. The coffin was a popular feature on early tours. Guides could make it look as if the lid was being opened and closed by using their lanterns to cast shadows on the wall behind it.

Giant’s Coffin in the main section of Mammoth Cave

Very little of Mammoth Cave near the Historic Entrance was spared of graffiti, even something like the Giant’s Coffin. Some of the graffiti is modern vandalism. Note the two signatures from 1967 in the photo below.

Modern graffiti on the Giant’s Coffin in the main section of Mammoth Cave

Tuberculosis Hospital Ruins

A little farther down the main passageway of Mammoth Cave from the Giant’s Coffin is the ruins of what was once a tuberculosis hospital. This was the brainchild of Dr. John Croghan, who in 1839 purchased Mammoth Cave for $10,000. While in Germany, he learned of a theory that tuberculosis could be cured by breathing drier air. He also noted that people who went into Mammoth Cave, either to work or on a tour, often told him that they felt much better breathing the air inside, which was typically drier than the air outside. This gave him the idea of setting up a tuberculosis hospital inside the cave during the winter when the humidity was at its lowest. Two living quarters made of stone and eight made of wood and canvas were built, and sixteen patients came to live in the cave for five months in late 1842 through early 1843. In the end, the experiment was a failure and the hospital was closed. A few patients actually died in the cave, and one is now buried in the Old Guide’s Cemetery that you can see when hiking the Heritage Trail. Today all that remains of the tuberculosis hospital are the two stone quarters, one of which is in poor condition.

Tour group approaches the Tuberculosis Hospital inside Mammoth Cave

Remnants of the Tuberculosis Hospital inside Mammoth Cave

Star Chamber

The Star Chamber is a section of Mammoth Cave where the once-white gypsum-covered ceiling has been darkened from the soot of cane reed torches used by prehistoric people who came this far into the cave to mine the gypsum on the walls, and later the more modern oil lanterns used by cave guides who brought paying tourists into the cave. The guides discovered that if they threw stones at the ceiling, the stone would knock off the dark outer layer and expose the white of the gypsum, and in a cave lit only by lanterns, these spots looked like stars. The guides also realized they could charge male tourists for the privilege of creating a star for their girlfriends or wives who were also on the tour. What guy is going to say “no thanks” with his wife or girlfriend standing right next to him?

Fat Man’s Misery

The start of Fat Man’s Misery inside Mammoth Cave

The Star Chamber marks the Grand Historic Tour’s farthest point into the Main Cave, and the group now returns to the Giant’s Coffin. A passageway on the left side of the coffin leads to one of the most interesting sections of Mammoth Cave, passing a number of geological features such as the Bottomless Pit before entering into a narrow and sometimes very short (as in low ceilings) passageway called Fat Man’s Misery. Most of Mammoth Cave is exactly that—mammoth. This is why Fat Man’s Misery is so much fun. You won’t be crawling through the dirt on your hands and knees, but it is more of what people expect from a cave—narrow passageways that you have to twist, turn, and stoop to get through.

Passageway at the Devil’s Coffin leads farther into Mammoth Cave

Getting to Fat Man’s Misery first requires descending a staircase. The ceilings even here are often low, and adult tour participants must constantly duck to avoid hitting their heads. Once at the bottom of the stairs, the tour continues down a passageway with a very low ceiling called Dante’s Gateway.

Staircase to Dante’s Gateway inside Mammoth Cave

Dante’s Gateway inside Mammoth Cave

The first points of interest are Sidesaddle Pit and the Bottomless Pit, with the Bottomless Pit being the more photogenic of the two. In the early days of cave tourism, guides would toss rocks or even lighted torches into the pit so customers could watch them disappear. It wasn’t really bottomless, and explorers eventually figured out it was only 105 feet deep. When done, the group would turn around because there was no way to proceed past this point.

In the 1840s, Stephen Bishop, a guide, cave explorer, and slave, rose to international prominence as an expert on Mammoth Cave. He was often the requested guide for visiting geologists and other scientists, and he learned from each of them until he knew as much as they did. He was the first to cross the Bottomless Pit by placing a ladder across it (horizontally) and then crawling over it with his lantern held by his teeth. Today there is a bridge across the pit.

The Bottomless Pit inside Mammoth Cave

After the Bottomless Pit comes Fat Man’s Misery. At this point you are approximately 260 feet below the surface. This section of Mammoth Cave is a winding passageway that runs for only 100 feet but feels like a mile due to all the twisting and bending you must do. On a typical adult, it is narrower from the waist down and wider from the waist up, giving it a keyhole shape. Near the end, the floor comes up two feet, which means if you were barely walking straight up prior to this, the ceiling is now two feet lower. In all other sections of Mammoth Cave, visitors are asked not to touch any parts of the walls or ceilings. Here it is allowed, for there is no way to make it through without touching the rocks.

Fat Man’s Misery inside Mammoth Cave

The narrow passageway ends at the aptly named Great Relief Hall where, believe it or not, there is a modern restroom facility. Because it is four hours long, the Grand Historic Tour stops for a scheduled break here, but all other tours that come this way do not.

End of Fat Man’s Misery at Great Relief Hall inside Mammoth Cave

River Hall and River Styx

Once emerging from the Fat Man’s Misery section of Mammoth Cave, the Grand Historic Tour continues down a much wider and taller passageway to River Hall, 283 feet below the surface. This area has seating, and most every cave tour that passes through Fat Man’s Misery stops here for a lecture of some sort. In plain view is a staircase that eventually leads to a fire tower that tour participants must climb in order to get back to the Historic Entrance at the end of the tour.

Lecture area at River Hall inside Mammoth Cave

Less obvious at the seating area is a dark passageway to the rear that leads to the River Styx, the last point of interest visited on the Grand Historic Tour. There is no electricity in the passageway, so the tour guides hand out battery operated lanterns.

Rangers hand out lanterns at River Hall before heading to River Styx inside Mammoth Cave

What most people do not realize is that no matter where you are in Mammoth Cave, you are at a higher elevation than the Green River outside. This is possible because Mammoth Cave is inside a small mountain. Any rivers within the cave, such as the River Styx, are at the lowest levels of the cave. River Styx itself is 360 feet below the surface yet still a few feet in elevation above the Green River. In fact, at extreme high water levels on the Green River, water backs up into Mammoth Cave. In 2021, River Hall was a few feet underwater. And remember, River Hall is 77 feet above the River Styx.

Ranger shines a light down into the chasm where the River Styx flows, Mammoth Cave National Park

River Styx inside Mammoth Cave

A staircase leads from the River Styx overlook through a passageway that circles back to the lecture area of River Hall.

Staircase takes visitors beyond the River Styx inside Mammoth Cave

Mammoth Dome

All tours that reach River Hall eventually proceed out of the cave by way of Mammoth Dome. This is a geological feature that was created when a sinkhole on the surface formed and allowed water to seep into the limestone, eventually eroding a hollow pit approximately 190 feet deep, or 190 feet tall from the perspective of those standing at the bottom. The journey to Mammoth Dome begins by taking the staircase at River Hall through a passageway known as Sparks Avenue.

Staircase through Sparks Avenue eventually leads to Mammoth Dome inside Mammoth Cave

Other than Fat Man’s Misery, Mammoth Dome offers the best photo opportunities on the tour. The formations are known as the Ruins of Karnak.

Ruins of Karnak inside the Mammoth Dome, Mammoth Cave National Park

Ruins of Karnak inside the Mammoth Dome, Mammoth Cave National Park

Calcite formations and the Ruins of Karnak inside the Mammoth Dome, Mammoth Cave National Park

Flowstone formations inside Mammoth Dome at Mammoth Cave National Park

The stairs continue at the Ruins of Karnak, and there are a few landings on the way up where you can get different views of the formations.

View from the stairs above the Ruins of Karnak inside Mammoth Dome at Mammoth Cave National Park

View from the stairs above the Ruins of Karnak inside Mammoth Dome at Mammoth Cave National Park

The stairs eventually end at the fire tower, which is just more stairs, except these head straight up through the pit. It’s like climbing a lighthouse, if you’ve ever done that.

Fire tower inside Mammoth Dome, Mammoth Cave National Park

Cave Exit

Once at the top of the fire tower, the Grand Historic Tour continues down Auburn Avenue, a large and uneventful passageway, and comes out at the saltpeter mine. From there, take a left to get back to the Historic Entrance and exit Mammoth Cave.

Remains of the saltpeter mine inside Mammoth Cave

Visitors to Mammoth Cave exit via the Historic Entrance

Back to the Top