Lookout Mountain Caverns (Lookout Mountain Cave, or Lower Cave) is the second longest known cave in Hamilton County,

Tennessee Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...

. Its ''mapped'' length of 2.481 miles (3.993 kilometers) places it at 361st on the ''United States Long Caves List''. Unofficially, anecdotal reports of cave expeditions have exceed 12 miles with legends exceeding 82 miles. The cave is closed and public access is forbidden.

Entrance

The Lookout Mountain Cave entrance was at the base of Lookout Mountain along the Tennessee River at Moccasin Bend. The original opening was natural unlike manmade access to Ruby Falls. The opening is visible from "right-of-way boundaries" of the Railway and

Interstate 24 Interstate 24 (I-24) is an Interstate Highway in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States. It runs diagonally from I-57, south of Marion, Illinois, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, at I-75. It travels through Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, ...

, although it is widely considered to be sealed inside the tunnel. Despite the closure, the cave is bisected by a tunnel on a second railroad just south of the main entrance forcing one to emerge on the railway inside the tunnel and then accessing the rest of the cave from there. Officially the cave is closed, therefore accessing the cave is regarded as illegal trespassing. A 400-ft elevator shaft was built in 1928/1929, but it was closed and sealed in 2005. A mythical entrance (unverified legend) is located at

Noccalula Falls Park Noccalula Falls Park is a 250-acre (101-ha) public park located in Gadsden, Alabama, United States. The main feature of the park is a 90-foot (27-m) waterfall. Trails wind through Black Creek Gorge past caves, an aboriginal fort, an abandoned dam ...

Gadsden, Alabama Gadsden is a city in and the county seat of Etowah County in the U.S. state of Alabama. It is located on the Coosa River about northeast of Birmingham and southwest of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It is the primary city of the Gadsden Metropolitan ...

(in the vicinity of Lookout Mountain, Alabama) approximately 82 miles away from

Lookout Mountain Lookout Mountain is a mountain ridge located at the northwest corner of the U.S. state of Georgia, the northeast corner of Alabama, and along the southeastern Tennessee state line in Chattanooga. Lookout Mountain was the scene of the 18th-cen ...

. The entrance may have been closed in 1870 by dynamite due to moonshining, the legend has received significant attention by geologists and others.

Attractions

Several miles of the lower cave is mapped and developed with wooden steps and lighting.

Rock Formations

* Mystic Cove * Solomon's Temple * Devil's Seat * the Oriental Palace * the Winding Serpentine Trail The cave floor contains 13 square stone boxes. The history of the boxes are unknown and have been speculated to have been involved in either

Masonic Freemasonry or Masonry refers to Fraternity, fraternal organisations that trace their origins to the local guilds of Stonemasonry, stonemasons that, from the end of the 13th century, regulated the qualifications of stonemasons and their inte ...

Ku Klux Klan The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and ...

meetings. Moonshiners and outlaws also utilized the cave.

History

Prehistory

The cave is estimated to be 240 million years old. A 2005 expedition in Lookout Mountain Cave identified bones that dated back to the last ice age (

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological Epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fina ...

). A 1992 expedition found three jaguar skeletons, and in 1982 other animal remains were found and transferred to the Louisville Museum of Natural History.

1800s

The cave served as a campsite for the indigenous Native Americans. David S. Butrick from the

Brainerd Mission The Brainerd Mission was a Christian mission to the Cherokee in present-day Chattanooga, Tennessee. The associated Brainerd Mission Cemetery is the only part that remains, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. History B ...

, established in 1817, was the first to document visiting the lower cave in 1823. Lookout Mountain Cave was owned by Robert Cravens during the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states th ...

. He contracted with the Tennessee Military and Financial Board to deliver

saltpeter Potassium nitrate is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . This alkali metal nitrate salt is also known as Indian saltpetre (large deposits of which were historically mined in India). It is an ionic salt of potassium ions K+ and nitrat ...

to the Confederate government. On June 1, 1862, he rented the cave to the Confederate

Nitre and Mining Bureau The Confederate Nitre and Mining Bureau was a civilian government bureau to provide the Confederate States of America with needed materials such as copper, iron, lead, saltpeter, sulfur, zinc, and other metals. The Bureau oversaw civilian contracts ...

, who operated the cave until 1863 when Federal forces occupied Chattanooga. At one point the saltpeter mining operation was attacked by Federal forces: "Morale suffered after forces under General Ormsby M. Mitchel shelled the cave on June 7, 1863." Clearly, the cave was still in Confederate hands on that date. (See Matthews, 2007) The cave was also used as a hospital in the civil war where patients/visitors left 'graffiti' which may include the signature of

Andrew Jackson Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was an American lawyer, planter, general, and statesman who served as the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. Before being elected to the presidency, he gained fame as ...

. An 1869 article appearing in

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it i ...

notes a cave within Lookout Mountain that extends over 8 miles. in 1898 J.B. Pound sold underground rights to Southern Railway.

1900s

Between 1905 and 1908, the Southern Railway developed a double-track tunnel through part of Lookout Cave. Pollution from the locomotives deposited

soot Soot ( ) is a mass of impure carbon particles resulting from the incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons. It is more properly restricted to the product of the gas-phase combustion process but is commonly extended to include the residual pyrolysed ...

throughout the cave.

1920s-1930s

Leo Lambert (1895-1955) was a chemist and

natural scientist Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repea ...

credited with first exploring

Raccoon Mountain Caverns Raccoon Mountain Caverns is a cave located in Chattanooga, Tennessee in a band of Mississippian Period limestone, part of the Cumberland Plateau. The cave was officially discovered in 1929 by Leo Lambert, a local caver who had recently discovered ...

. He married Ruby Eugenia Losey in 1916. In 1923, Lambert attempted to reopen Lookout Mountain Cave to open a tourist attraction as the Lookout Mountain Cave Company. In 1928, he drilled to open a 400 ft. elevator shaft, however, on December 28 an opening was discovered and the following 17 hours were spent exploring, resulting in the discovery of a 145 ft waterfall draining into the

Tennessee River The Tennessee River is the largest tributary of the Ohio River. It is approximately long and is located in the southeastern United States in the Tennessee Valley. The river was once popularly known as the Cherokee River, among other names, ...

which Lambert named after his wife, Ruby, as

Ruby Falls Ruby Falls is a series of underground cascading waterfalls totaling in Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the United States. Geology About 200 to 240 million years ago (in the Carboniferous Period, at the end of the Paleozoic E ...

. Lambert developed both caves for his company, however, the 'upper cave' with Ruby Falls was far more popular than the 'lower cave' Lookout Mountain Cave therefore he discounted tours in 1935. The

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

resulted in bankruptcy causing Lambert to sell to Claude Brown for $25,000.

1940s

Claude Brown died in 1944. His wife controlled the cave and sold it between 1947 and 1949, eventually entering the partial ownership of the Lookout Advertising Company known posting roadside signs.

1960

Although Lookout Mountain Caverns has not been open to tourists for quite some time, the management of

did allow researchers to take the elevator (the shaft excavated in 1928–1929) down to Lookout Mountain Caverns by prior arrangement. This access resulted in the discovery of new passages since Thomas C. Barr Jr.'s description was published in 1961. Barr's 1961 discussion of the cave says that the cave was intersected by a railway tunnel, and thus the cave accumulated

that led to its closing to tourists. He says that "exploring of the cave is unpleasant because of the necessity of wading, crawling, climbing, and becoming covered with soot, which coats all the upward-facing surfaces." He says the soot extends well over a mile into the cave.

1980s-1990s

Various academic expeditions: * March 1982: Joel Sneed, Carole Sneed, and Larry O. Blair

2000s

In 2005 the State of Tennessee's elevator inspectors required the Ruby Falls operators to seal the portion of the elevator shaft below Ruby Falls and the cave became totally inaccessible as of 2006.

References

. "Caves of Chattanooga" by Larry E. Matthews, 2007, Published by the National Speleological Society, {{ISBN, 978-1-879961-27-2, Chapter 1 - Lookout Mountain Cave, pages 13–30. Caves of Tennessee Landforms of Hamilton County, Tennessee Lookout Mountain