Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland

1. Minerals, Moonshine, and Misanthropes

Minerals, Moonshine, and Misanthropes 15 15 Chapter 1 MINERALS, MOONSHINE, AND MISANTHROPES The Historic Use of Caves in the Upper Cumberland JOSEPH C. DOUGLAS Over the past two centuries, people in the Upper Cumberland used caves in several ways. One important early usage was for subsistence, as caves provided shelter from the elements and were sources of water for long hunters, travelers, and settlers. As permanent settlements increased throughout the nineteenth century, caves became somewhat less important as shelters but were thoroughly integrated into domestic household economies. Caves provided water for home use as well as cold storage, serving as both springhouses and root cellars. These interactions with the environment revealed a utilitarian emphasis in the culture of the Upper Cumberland, as the people were eminently practical in their approach to the natural world. Yet although these domestic and subsistence uses persisted well into the twentieth century, they represented only one theme in the complicated story of caves in the region. Caves were also potential sources of commodities, hidden and secretive spaces, natural curiosities, and social spaces. Even before Virginians, North Carolinians, and others established permanent settlements, the Upper Cumberland was part of a larger commercial economy. Despite difficulties of transport, long hunters began to extract resources, mostly furs, skins, and to a lesser extent meat, for sale back east, while the land itself was sold as a commodity to speculators and hopeful migrants. Caves were entwined in commerce by the early 1800s, primarily as a source of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), one of the vital ingredients in gunpowder. Other substances were also mined 16 JOSEPH C. DOUGLAS from caves and sold, but a substantial trade in saltpeter developed along the Cumberland River. Between roughly 1800 and 1863, many dozens of caves across the region were mined for saltpeter. Emerging towns such as Carthage became collection areas, linking the Upper Cumberland to the gunpowder industries in Nashville, Lexington, and perhaps even DuPont’s powder mills in Delaware. Long before the rise of substantial coal and timber industries, people in the region developed long-term extraction of cave minerals. Yet subsistence and domestic use, coupled with commercialization, is not the whole picture of the environmental history of caves. Even if no substances were mined and a cave was unsuited for domestic use, caves were sublime manifestations of nature. As a result they were increasingly used as social spaces, where people met and engaged in a variety of noncommercial activities. People played music, danced, and even held church services underground. These activities bespeak a rich and complex relationship with the cave environment. It is clear that several patterns of conceiving of, and using, caves coexisted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, caves served as secret , hidden spaces, important for hermits, criminals, or ordinary folk seeking safe refuge during the disruptions of the Civil War. Later, moonshiners turned to caves as hidden production sites for their untaxed , illegal liquor. Caves are not evenly distributed across the landscape of the Upper Cumberland. The top of the Cumberland Plateau contains relatively few extensive caves, though the sandstones of the upper sequence of Pennsylvanian -age rocks lend themselves to the formation of the shallow rock-shelters that are ubiquitous in the valley of the Big South Fork and common in the other plateau areas. Grassy Cove in Cumberland County is an exception to this generalization, as the limestones both on the mountain flanks and in the cove itself contain substantial caves. In contrast to the short, shallow caves atop the plateau, numerous extensive limestone caves formed as river valleys cut deep into the Cumberland Plateau, exposing the Monteagle, Bangor, St. Louis, and Warsaw limestones below in the Mississippian sequence. In the tributary river valleys, such as the East and West Obey, the Caney Fork, the Calfkiller, and the Roaring, and along the dissected western edge of the plateau, hundreds of caves were formed by weak carbonic acid dissolving the limestone. Some passages continue to form, and function as active conduits for water flow; others, now dry and partially filled with sediment, represent former stream passages that were abandoned as the Minerals, Moonshine, and Misanthropes 17 water table dropped. After the formation of a cave, secondary deposition creates interesting, and sometimes unique, minerals, commonly including calcite and gypsum. Eventually, breakdown of the host rock and erosion complete the cave’s life cycle. Thus, caves of the Upper Cumberland are varied in their...