Transcript:

Rachelle Wright (00:10):

Thanks for being here with us today at Hidden River Cave. We’re here with Dave Foster

Dave Foster (00:16):

And I’m the president and the Chief Executive Officer of the American Cave Conservation Association, which is a nonprofit organization that broadens the American Cave Museum and Hidden River Cave here in Horse Cave Kentucky.

Rachelle Wright (00:31):

We are about to be at the place in history where we are commemorating the 100 years of Floyd Collins entrapment in Sand Cave, which for many reasons is something to be noted in the history of Kentucky and in many areas of the world in science and in broadcasting. There’s many notable moments, I think. So can you tell me a little bit about how Hidden River Cave and the American Cave Museum are so closely tied with the story of Floyd Collins?

Dave Foster (01:11):

Well, I feel like we’re right now part of the living embodiment of the cave wars in this generation. Floyd was one of the victims of the cave wars. If you’re not familiar with the cave wars there was, somebody said years ago that if God had only invented one cave, mammoth cave, everything would’ve been fine. But during the depression, we had dozens of caves. And when you had people that were incredibly poor living in this part of the country and the people that lived up in the hills didn’t have good farm land, couldn’t make a very good crop. Well, having a cave on your property was like having a gold mine or so they thought. And so there were lots and lots of people developed caves and they developed an intense competition to get the cave visitor to come to your cave because the Mammoth Cave Estate was the big one that had developed first.

(02:23):

And all these caves began to be found around Mammoth Cave. And so people would set up booths on the sides of the road and say, don’t go to this cave because it’s just a muddy hole in the ground. Come over here. It’s really pretty. And they would have rock fights between the caves solicit jury on the street, and it became known as the Kentucky Cave Wars. And back in the day, and there was a lot of speculation as Mammoth Cave continued to get larger and larger, that it went off the grounds of mammoth cave estate. And so various people tried to find new caves that would connect to Mammoth, and George Morrison was one of the first big successes of the cave. Or he bought a piece of property and went in and secretly surveyed inside Mammoth Cave and figured out where the cave ran and put in a new entrance and called it the new entrance to Mammoth Cave.

(03:26):

So the Mammoth Cave Estate sued him for using the words Mammoth Cave, and he went to court and showed that you could go into Mammoth Cave and come into his cave, and it was the same cave. So he was allowed to use the words new entries to Mammoth Cave, although courts told him to put some language to the effect that this is not the same cave that was shown prior to 19, whatever the date was when he opened it up. It was not the same section of Cave, but it was still part of Mammoth Cave. So that was the era that Floyd Collins came into. It was a time when cave travel was changing. The first visitors went to Mammoth Cave, went by stage fruit, and they came down the river. And then the railroads got in the game. Glasgow Junction, which is now Park City, began to bring people down by rail.

(04:24):

And there were two or three caves near there that opened up a hundred dome cave, diamond Caverns, ter Cave. And so suddenly there were multiple caves. And the way Hidden River Cave got involved was the Thomas family out of New York came here, opened this cave, and they came along at the onset of a completely new type of transportation system called the automobile. He automobile built 10 twenties. And so as automobile traffic began to replace railroad traffic, Dr. Thomas bought Cave right here, hidden River Cave right in the center of town. He bought a mammoth Onyx cave, not Mammoth cave, but Mammoth Onyx Cave, which was a small cave that was on the Ellen N Turnpike between Louisville and Nashville, and eventually bought Floyd Collins Crystal Cave after Floyd died. But they had a relationship with Floyd. Apparently. Floyd came here and helped Dr. Thomas build some of the stairs, helped him do some exploring.

(05:36):

Floyd rented himself out to anybody that wanted to explore caves. And so Dr. Thomas was one of the big cave entrepreneurs. Floyd Collins was a passionate caver who wasn’t just, people thought he was just this crazy guy that like to crawl in the mud. But Floyd had aspirations too. He had seen George Morrison’s success in opening the new interest in Mammoth. He had found a cave on his family farm that was one of the most beautiful caves in the area named a crystal cave because of the thousands of gypson crystals in the king. And so Floyd really wanted to be the next George Morrison. He wanted to find a cave interest that would connect Crystal Cave that was closer to the main road because to get to Floyd’s Cave, you had to go

(06:32):

Way down the highway past the new entrance to Mammoth, passed the historic entrance to Mammoth and weighed four miles down this windy dirt road to get to Floyd Collins Crystal Cave. So there weren’t many tourists left at the end of the road. So Floyd’s goal was getting a new entrance that was closer to the main road, and he certainly knew Dr. Thomas. And Dr. Thomas was another one of the players in the cave wars of that era. And he initially was very successful and ended up being one of the big losers, just like Paul Collins, in that he lost his cave to a groundwater lawsuit and a trespassing charges and a lot of pollution issues. But at the time, Dr. Thomas had one of the biggest cave empire in central Kentucky running then he was running this cave hitting rid of the cave, and he was running mammos cave. And after Floyd died, he negotiated with Floyd’s dad and bought Floyd Collins Crystal caves. We had three big caves he was running.

Rachelle Wright (07:47):

Isn’t it interesting two to think about someone having a cave empire? I mean, when you really, that’s not something we hear much anymore. I’m sure. That’s exactly. Evidently, if they were from New York, that was part of his goal was to really get into the cave business when he came here.

Dave Foster (08:11):

Well, and when you visit caves around the world, a lot of countries, you can’t even own a cave. The government owns the caves. And so it’s always surprising to people in the US that you can own a cave.

Rachelle Wright (08:23):

And there are still many privately owned caves today.

Dave Foster (08:26):

Very much so. Mammoth Cave is now, it’s a federally owned cave. It’s a national park, but it’s comprised of, gosh, a whole bunch of caves that are eventually connected into one big one and many other Sloans. But those were all privately owned during Floyd Collins era. There were one point, I think I counted something like 21 different showcases in this

Rachelle Wright (08:51):

Area. That’s significant,

Rachelle Wright (08:54):

No wonder there were wars.

Tony Wright (08:55):

Yeah, I don’t think I realized. I didn’t know that it was a hostile environment in those times. Well, you had a

Dave Foster (09:02):

Lot of Yankee traders around here. It was tough times. It was very tough times. If you got a hard gravel piece of land and you’re not growing many crops on it, and all you got to do is put a little walkway through a cave and a tourist will show up and pay you a dollar to go through the cave, that was pretty good money.

Rachelle Wright (09:27):

Yeah, that’s the thing to do. It becomes the thing to do for sure. So if we go back to sand cave specific, and that is where Floyd was entrapped. It really was for Floyd about location, location, location. Because Crystal Cave, as you mentioned, well, we’ve hiked back there. It takes a minute to get back there. It’s gorgeous once you’re back there. But I see now the way you’ve described it, it was kind of the end of the line once you passed everything else, both with a railroad and with an automobile. And sand cave’s position is in between the historic entrance and Cave City, which of course became such a gateway for Mammoth Cave National Park.

Dave Foster (10:16):

That’s the interest to Mammoth Cave.

Rachelle Wright (10:18):

Yeah. So I can see where Floyd was really correct in his entrepreneurial thoughts of zoning in on that as a location. Was Dr. Thomas involved in Floyd’s exploration of saying cave at all, or is that just something Floyd was doing?

Dave Foster (10:34):

I don’t think so. That was something Pete was doing. Like I said, I’m told that Dr. Thomas had employed Floyd here at Hidden River ca to do some things. Floyd kind of cut his teeth working with Edmond Turner and Gron cave caves. They developed that. And then Floyd, kind of great Ony cave was on down the ridge fairly close to Floyd Collins coastal cave. And so Floyd had an idea that there might be something, and he was looking for caves from his family farm, and apparently it was a cold winter and they were doing a lot of trapping. And Floyd had a trap that kind of got an animal pulled down into a deep sink hole when it kind of disappeared. And in the process of looking for his trap, he found this hole and that became Crystal Cave. And he dug it out and ran back to his family and said, look what I found. They went in and just huge passages and beautiful passage with lots of crystal. And so then the Floyd Collins family became immediately immersed in the cave business. They were farmers. Sure. And I think Floyd was sort of the catalyst straw that he was the big caveman in the TA family as participating at up.

(11:53):

But the cave never quite did what Floyd wanted it to do. I know his dad wanted to sell the property. Floyd had set up an agreement with his dad where he would own half the rights for finding the cave and developing it, and the dad got kind of tired of it and wanted to sell it. And Floyd held back and held back because he really still believed it could be a big success. And that’s kind of what led him to looking at the map. There’s a ridge that comes together where it looks like both Mammoth Cave and Floyd Collins Crystal Cave could converge, and Floyd thought that was a potential possible place to find a new entrance. And on the Doyle property out there on what’s now Highway 70 on the way to Cave City. And so we went to that family and set up an agreement where a typical agreement was, let me find the cave and develop it, and we’ll give you half the profits.

(13:01):

I think Floyd had a pretty tough agreement with those folks. They were going to feed him and housing him some too while he was looking. So Floyd set out, one nasty January morning, on January the 30th.

(13:19):

And climbed into what really wasn’t much of a cave, more of a crevice that just goes down, down about 150 feet. And apparently he popped through into what looked like more cave. And on the way out, his lantern accidentally blew out, which is kind of a scary thing.

(13:46):

And Floyd couldn’t quite reach the lanterns to set it back up. He was used to that kind of thing. So he pushed on ahead and began crawling through this area. Well, he’d done quite a bit of dynamiting and blasting and digging in this hole. And so there was a lot of loose rock around him and on the way out, not being able to see what he was doing. So the story goes, he kicked the rock loose and he had very gingerly maneuvered passed it on the way in. They were coming back out, and he kicked it loose on his leg and got situated in a situation where he was in a very, very tight passage. The rock was on his leg, he was laying on his arm. Floyd realized there wasn’t much he could do. He hollered for help, but at that point it was just waiting for his brothers and some of his family and caving friends to come looking for him.

Rachelle Wright (14:41):

So that’s how he was discovered, the dilemma. That’s how they found that he was stuck.

Dave Foster (14:49):

And so goes the story. His mother was pretty distraught about him going in that cave because he had recounted some story to her about a dream that he had about rocks falling on him and the angels taking him, rescuing him. And so his mother was saying, don’t go in that hole today. But Floyd just kind of poo pooed it and went ahead. This is the kind of story would’ve never told my mother when I was heading out, she would have never let me go in cave.

Rachelle Wright (15:24):

I will, I guess, pick on our son a little bit. As kids who grew up here, there’s always “Let’s go into this old cave we know about.” And when I realized he was doing that some, I said, “Just don’t tell me. Tell someone what you’re doing, but please don’t make it me until you’re out safely.” So I think that when you have grown up in this area, there’s a lot of mothers that are concerned about this very thing. And going back to the story of Floyd’s mom, this was such a sensational story.

Dave Foster (16:00):

Well, the thing is, if you’re going to be a caver, you need to aspire to be a caver and not a famous caver. You know what you have to do to become a famous caver? You have to die in the cave.

(16:12):

That’s sadly true.

Rachelle Wright (16:16):

And that is what unfortunately makes the news so many of the times, is our tragedies.

Dave Foster (16:24):

Caves are generally pretty safe places. I mean, the number of people who have died in caves is very rare. Most of the people that have died in caves have been engaged in digging operations within doing something. There’ve just been a few people that have really been trapped and died in caves,

Rachelle Wright (16:43):

And Floyd had been working his way in with some devices, I’m sure.

Dave Foster (16:49):

But the thing is, from a news story, the idea of being trapped in a cave is so horrific to most people.

Rachelle Wright (16:56):

Absolutely.

Dave Foster (16:56):

It’s a much bigger story than if you have more people go out on a lake and drowned every year.

Rachelle Wright (17:04):

Excellent point.

New Speaker (17:05):

That’s not news, like an entrapment.

Rachelle Wright (17:08):

Entrapment, just the word

Dave Foster (17:10):

Horrific.

Rachelle Wright (17:10):

Yeah, just the word entrapment. And so there were so many of these additional caveats to the story that came out along the way about what Floyd’s mother felt before, what Floyd’s Dream might have been, Floyd’s dog waiting for him at the cave entrance.

Dave Foster (17:31):

That wasn’t Floyd’s dog.

Rachelle Wright (17:32):

Right.

Dave Foster (17:33):

When the news showed up, and obviously, what are you going to talk about? You’ve got a guy stuck in a hole. You can’t even interview him, you can’t get to him. One guy interviewed him named Skeets Miller, made it down, won a Pulitzer doing that, but he was one of the few reporters that got down there. So you’re interviewing all the people, the spectators in the crowd. They’re all milling around the cave entrance. Everybody’s got a story. Everybody wants to be on the news. The newspapers see a sad looking girl sitting there somewhere. Well, she becomes his girlfriend whether she was or not. There’s a dog there. “Floyd’s dog patiently waits for him.”

(18:13):

So there’s a little embellish.

(18:16):

Yeah, there’s a lot of embellishment. Then there were stories going about that this was a big publicity stunt. That Floyd was secretly going out back entrance….

(18:25):

Oh wow.

(18:28):

In this house and eating a big meal and then going back and

Rachelle Wright (18:31):

Staging himself back in

Dave Foster (18:34):

Staging himself for a publicity event. t

(18:36):

And the crazy thing is this came about at a time when prior to 1925, the idea of a viral news story just about didn’t exist. We didn’t have a lot of easy ways to mass communicate information. We didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have television. But at that timeframe, we had a new medium called radio, which began to be in people’s houses. And it also coincided with a time when they were starting to be able to do remote broadcasts, which when radio first started, you’d have all the equipment in a big music hall somewhere in New York, and that was the only place you could record on radio. But then they developed technology to take remote broadcasting things out in the field. So suddenly mom and dad and the kids sitting at home and they turn on the radio news all over America, and every station is broadcasting the story of this poor man stuck in a cave in Kentucky. It was one of the first viral news stories in the world.

Rachelle Wright (19:47):

In the world. What a time to have been alive and to have had all of these new things happening. I can see how it did have all the pieces for a major viral story. A little tragedy, a little sorrow, a little “Can he make it out?” Anticipation.

Dave Foster (20:09):

And the story went on for weeks. So people were tuning in every day. “Did they get him out? Did they not get him out? Is he dead? Is he alive?”

Rachelle Wright (20:17):

It really became a saga, the saga of Floyd Collins. How long was he in the cave?

Dave Foster (20:24):

I knew you had asked me that. It was, I think somewhere between 10 and…

Rachelle Wright (20:29):

That’s what I was thinking as well. And so back to where we are, and it’s so lovely here at Hidden River Cave, you all are now the keepers of many artifacts and things from Floyd’s story.

Dave Foster (20:47):

We have some cool stuff here and we feel like we’re the keepers of the cave history in this region and not the only ones. There are several people that do a lot of the history of the area, but when we came here…the American Cave Conservation Association was invited here by Bill and Judy Austin, who owned Kentucky Down Under, which was an animal park that was built around Mammoth Onyx Cave. And Bill was a very seminal figure and the cave in community, he had helped found a group called the Cave Research Foundation.

(21:29):

Which was a science group that did much of the mapping and exploration of Mammoth Cave in the 1950s and sixties and continues to this day. And so Bill’s family owned Hidden River Cave and Bill went off to Antarctica to build a habitat for the scientists during the first expeditions to Antarctica in the 1950s, during what they called the Iggy Expeditions. And he was an engineer. He trained at the University of Kentucky, so he was designing habitat. Met his wife in Australia. They came back here and while Bill was gone, Hidden River Cave had become horribly polluted. A creamery had located upstream from the cave, was dumping milky creamy waste into the cave, gave it a real sour cream odor. If you’ve ever opened a milk jug that got left in the refrigerator too long, that’s what you smell. And you could smell it in the cave and all around town. And then we had a metal plating plant that was dumping heavy metals in the cave. And so the family legacy had been very heavily damaged. And so Bill wanted to get the cave restored again. He didn’t have any kids that wanted to be in the cave business. His son was kind of an automobile guy. His daughter Jackie had moved to Washington DC, I’m not quite sure what she did. His other daughter, Judy Osten, went into the medical field.

(23:14):

So that family had been in the cave business for four generations. His aunt and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, they developed Hidden River Cave and he wasn’t going to have any heirs that wanted to run the cave. And so he recruited the American Cave Conservation Association. He was looking for an organization and we were the ones that got interested in it and we were in Richmond, Virginia. So he recruited us to come and move out here to Kentucky and set up our headquarters in a downtown building that bill had, had developed. Well, that was just built right around the cave entrance. We call these buildings our spite buildings because they were built out of spite by Clarence Owens who owned the Owens Hotel. And Clarence and Harry Thomas, the cave owner, didn’t get along very well.

(24:15):

They hated each other’s guts. And so Clarence got a hold of the property and built the buildings to hide the cave when Dr. Thomas wanted to have a nice open town square here with a cave in the center of it. But Clarence was gone and Dr. Thomas was gone. And the American Cave Conservation Associates who came here, we were able to get some grant money to buy these buildings that were in the cave entrance. And so we set up shop and we weren’t sure if we were going to get the cave back because the cave was still very heavily polluted with sewage pollution. Bill had been working for a number of years with Congressmen Natcher, with the park service, with several different entities to try to raise money to build a regional sewer system to clean up the caves. And the American Cave Conservation Association came. We jumped into that fight and then we began setting up shop and putting on conservation programs, educational programs.

(25:14):

And our first idea was, well, we might not get the cave back, but let’s build a museum to talk about the problems that are affecting caves. Because Hidden River Cave was known as the most polluted cave in America. One of the first books I ever read about caves was the time life series called “Life of the Cave.” There was a “Life of the Forest”, “Life of the Desert”, and there was a “Life of the Cave.” And I found the “Life of the Cave” fascinating. And there was actually an article in there about the caves of Mammoth Cave, and it talked about this cave, Hidden River Cave that was polluted.

Rachelle Wright (25:50):

Really?

Dave Foster (25:52):

This is when I was growing up. And suddenly, I’m out here in the middle of cave war history.

Rachelle Wright (25:58):

There you are.

Dave Foster (25:58):

I had read all these books about caves and suddenly I’m living in the Thomas House, like living in a museum where Bill’s grandfather and aunt had all lived and left all their stuff in the drawers.

Rachelle Wright (26:15):

Fascinating

Dave Foster (26:16):

It was like a living museum.

Rachelle Wright (26:17):

Now, when did you all move here and acquire the buildings?

Dave Foster (26:21):

I moved here in 1986.

Rachelle Wright (26:25):

Okay.

Dave Foster (26:25):

The very end of the year. I think I got in New Year’s Eve actually.

Rachelle Wright (26:29):

Okay, so you started in the fight in 1986?

Dave Foster (26:32):

Yeah.

Rachelle Wright (26:33):

Maybe a couple of days after you got here.

Dave Foster (26:35):

Right.

(26:36):

Bill had an office building that he let me use for free, and we sit up shop. There were two or three of us that worked for the American Conservation Association. I had a director named Jerry Thornton who was from out in Idaho who was running the American Cave Conservation Association. And he was kind of a real activist environmentalist. His approach to environmentalism was more of the, that’s the earth first approach of be a real activist. I was more of an educator. The activism doesn’t work in Kentucky. If you’ve ever tried to tell somebody in Kentucky what to do…

Rachelle Wright (27:20):

Doesn’t always go over real well.

Dave Foster (27:21):

Doesn’t go over real well. They have to decide on their own what to do.

Rachelle Wright (27:25):

Through education hopefully.

Dave Foster (27:28):

And so Jerry didn’t work out and the board kind of sent him packing and they left me here saying, “can you….Dave, can you hold the flag and wave it while we try to find another executive director?” And one thing I knew was we had to raise some money because Jerry was not a good fundraiser and he hadn’t raised any money. And we had brought a few dollars with us, but not a lot. And so Bill helped me get a $5,000 donation from the Horse Cave Bank.

Rachelle Wright (28:00):

Okay.

Dave Foster (28:02):

The mayor was real interested in this project at the time, Bob Strickland. And then he set me up for some wins. He called Sally Bingham up that had been a big theater supporter for the Horse Cave Theater and got me to call her and ask her for $5,000. And then she said yes. And I thought I was the greatest fundraiser that, and I’m pretty sure I was set up.

Rachelle Wright (28:24):

Success. Yes.

Dave Foster (28:26):

Bill told me, I said, “Bill, I don’t know how to fundraise.” He says, “Well, I told Warren Hammock this when Warren came to me with the same thing.” Warren Hammock was the theater director. And Warren said, “I don’t know how to fundraise.” And Bill said, “You’re an actor, aren’t you? Act like a fundraiser.”

Rachelle Wright (28:45):

That’s right.

Dave Foster (28:46):

And so I set up shop and began acting like a fundraiser, began writing grants. And it took several years of starving before we started to really do much. Actually it turned in about 25 years of starving. But we are still here and we’re doing better now. But we had the idea that we were working to get the sewer treatment plant built in place. We thought that would allow the cave to recover. And in the meantime, I’d been able to get some nice grants. I got a $250,000 grant from the James Graham Brown Foundation. The mayor had a community development block grant, which is federal money in the works to renovate the building. And so we were able to build some exhibits and kind of open a small museum. There wasn’t much here, but we had some museum exhibits and we slowly began to open the cave.

(29:45):

The first year or two, we just walked down to the entrance and then we put some stairs in, had some volunteers from the Cleveland, Cleveland Gtotto, a caving club up in Cleveland, came down there and we built a set of stairs down near the cave with volunteers down to the river level. And then over the next 15 years, we kept adding passage. The cave kept getting better. And to what we eventually started to have a cave tour. And we were still struggling quite a bit because when you’re 20 miles away from the longest cave in the world and you’re pretty much giving an entrance tour in a polluted cave, it’s not a strong selling point,

Tony Wright (30:31):

Yeah.

Dave Foster (30:32):

It was a tough sell and I was reluctant to spend a lot of money on advertising because I didn’t have much to advertise. So some things happened during the pandemic that really changed that. And maybe we can talk about that later, but we’re doing much better now. But that was the start. And it was probably as if you start, as you can imagine, but in a lot of ways it’s conducive to the cave war experience because the vast majority of people that got involved in the cave wars as cave operators didn’t do so well. There were a few big winners, George Morrison, but most of them didn’t make much money.

Rachelle Wright (31:19):

Boiled down to its most fundamental state, it was a small business. And small business development and running is tough. It depends on you 24 hours a day, when you’re the small business owner.

Dave Foster (31:36):

Floyd was not a business person. He wasn’t a well educated guy, but he knew caves and he loved caves. And we just knew that if he could just get people to hear about that great cave that he would do very well.

Rachelle Wright (31:52):

He knew his wheelhouse as they say.

Dave Foster (31:57):

I feel like I’m part of that lineage because I came here really with a degree in geology and a degree in music, not knowing what I wanted to do with life. And I fell in love with the cave and I wanted to make it into something. That’s really no different than what Floyd did. Although I didn’t get myself stuck. Although I did have one incident where we went into the cave and we had a group deep in the cave. We had a major flood and we had to go and get them out. And I can tell you that’s the closest I’ve ever felt to cashing in my chips. And it’s not a good feeling.

Rachelle Wright (32:38):

You all, if I’m remembering correctly, ended up a little bit on CNN over that as well.

Dave Foster (32:43):

We made the national, we were viral. We were on Good Morning American CNN Weather Channel Fox.

Rachelle Wright (32:49):

Again, to your point about there’s that fear of being entrapped in dark plates, and that does make a great story.

Dave Foster (32:59):

The crazy thing, we weren’t even trapped. We were doing an evacuation. It took about three hours to get in and get the people turned around and get ’em out. And the water rose from about two inches to about four or five feet. And we got out okay. But everybody on the surface couldn’t communicate with us. And so they thought the worst. And so it was a viral news story, a school group, a bunch of hydrology and geology, university students trapped in a flooding cave.

Rachelle Wright (33:28):

In Kentucky.

Dave Foster (33:30):

And we got out and then I was fielding these crazy….I had an Associated Press reporter call me at seven o’clock the next morning. I’ve just been through this ordeal. And he wakes me up at seven o’clock and then wants to chat. And I got kind of mad at him. He starts talking to me about, “Well, don’t you think the government come in and start regulating these caves?” And I just let him have it. I just said, you know what?

Tony Wright (33:55):

Interesting.

Dave Foster (33:56):

We probably have 2000 people a year drowned in lakes and rivers in the United States. Maybe the government should drain all those lakes and rivers. You get one guy dying in a cave in 50 years

(34:10):

We had a close call, but nobody was killed. And we need the government to react to the caves.

Rachelle Wright (34:16):

And when you mention it’s a three hour evacuation, that is a long evacuation for those of us on the surface. Thinking about that for you all, that’s been your plan all along

Dave Foster (34:29):

Four or five hours back in the cave and it took an hour and a half to get back and get them and get them turned around and an hour and half to get ’em out.

Rachelle Wright (34:36):

Sure. It takes time. Caves are not. And as you were, I’ve loved listening to you talk about the slow and steady advancements you all have made here. Now below us is the longest suspension bridge underground in the world. So I mean major advancements that you all have made as well as the restoration of the health of the cave. That did come when the sewer system was put in place that you all had been petitioning for so long. So yeah, that little story you read in that Time Life article series as a child, you’ve lived it, the restoration.

Dave Foster (35:23):

It’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a good life. And it’s interesting that things happen with the publicity around here. The whole Floyd Collins rescue probably contributed to Mammoth Cave becoming a national park.

Rachelle Wright (35:38):

Absolutely.

Dave Foster (35:39):

It brought national attention to this area. We went through what I could have been the death nail for us when Covid hit. That spring before Covid, we were having a particularly wet spring. When we have a wet spring, we flood a lot when we flood.

Rachelle Wright (36:02):

Can’t get anybody in there.

Dave Foster (36:04):

So we were hurting already. And then Covid hit and all of a sudden we closed down in May. Didn’t open back up until August. And that should have been the end of. But I like to tell people we were too small to fail. They’re all talking, all the banks too big to fell. We were too small to fail. We just kind of hunkered in and held in there. But the great thing about what happened during the pandemic, if there’s a silver lining there, a lot of losers and there were winners, but the government did make a lot of pandemic release money available. And we had been struggling for so long that we knew exactly what to do. We applied for PPP loans right off the bat. We got forgivable loans and we had a notice that the SBA was loaning money. And normally the small business administration wouldn’t loan to nonprofits, didn’t have equity, but in this case they changed their rules. And so we applied for $150,000 small business administration and all and didn’t hear anything, didn’t hear anything. I called Congressman Guthrie’s office up and they got on the phone with an SBA guy and I told ’em, I said, look, I employed 10 people here. We’re a small business, we’d been shut down for three months. Why can’t we get any help? And turns out it was some little thing. The bank had changed hands and they had a different routing number and they were red flagging list for that.

(37:43):

And the next day we had the money in the bank.

Rachelle Wright (37:45):

Wow.

Dave Foster (37:45):

So for the first time when we were before the pandemic, I couldn’t borrow money. We didn’t own the cave. The city owned the cave. We were leasing it from the city, but the city council wasn’t going to go, let me borrow get $150,000 in debt. But the SBA made this loan to us and we had never had any cash flow ever up to that point. We had just enough to pay the next month’s bills. And so suddenly we had $150,000 in the bank. And I turned around and spent most of it on advertising and it completely turned us around. And it would also help that we had just finished right before the pandemic. We had just finished, we had gotten several grants. We’d gotten a community development block grant. No, I’m sorry. That’s wrong. We had gotten several grants. We’d gotten an ARC grant, which is Appalachian Regional Commission grant, about $300,000. Got the James Graham Brown Foundation gave us a hundred thousand dollars. DART Foundation, Dart Container Corporation in Horse Cave gave us another a hundred thousand.

(38:55):

And then we had some private donations of about 50,000 to develop the tour. We had one of the largest cave rooms in Kentucky called Sunset Dome. But we couldn’t get there until, first of all, we had to buy the property getting there. And that took 20 years. And we finally got the property acquired in 2017. And then we spent two or three years raising this grant money. Started building this project around 2018, 2019, and got it finished. Got to Sunset Dome. We built the longest underground swinging bridge in the world. And we finished in February of 2020. Guess what happens?

Rachelle Wright (39:41):

The pandemic

Dave Foster (39:42):

Just in time while

(39:45):

Talking about unlucky, you, this cave had sewage pollution problems, had trespassing lawsuits from the railroads that went over top of the cave. And now the pandemic shuts us down right after we finally get the tour developed. But it turned out to be a good thing because it gave us time to kind of kick back and reassess and figure out how to advertise the cave. And we had loan money that we could use to advertise and we built a lot of interstate signage. And when the pandemic opened back up, bam, we were a new attraction. We went one year’s time. We had been averaging 10,000 customers a year. In 2021 we jumped to 29,000 visitors.

Rachelle Wright (40:30):

Wow.

Dave Foster (40:31):

Now that doesn’t happen ever when you’ve been in business for 30 years. But it did to us because

Rachelle Wright (40:38):

What a success story.

Dave Foster (40:39):

We had added a lot of value to the cave and we had were able to spend a lot of money to advertise. And I look back at Poor Floyd and I think poor guy, he had the best cave in the area, by far.

Rachelle Wright (40:56):

I haven’t been in. But they say it’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

Dave Foster (40:59):

If you can get people there.

Rachelle Wright (41:02):

Again, location.

Dave Foster (41:04):

He was trapped twice. At the end of his life, he was trapped in the cave. But most of his life he was trapped trying to run a business that was so far off the beaten path that people couldn’t find him. And location, location, location was everything.

Rachelle Wright (41:21):

And that is a tragedy as well. And so when the Thomas family, when Bill entered his era of taking over what the cave empire they had created was much of the artifacts you all have here about Floyd just left in their possession or have you all acquired some of these things that you have?

Dave Foster (41:49):

We didn’t have a lot of Floyd stuff. I mean, I had a lot of Bills files and he had files from the railroad lawsuits and things like that, which was really evident and stuff on Hidden River Cave and Mammoth Onyx Cave. We had some pictures from Floyd Collins Crystal Cave from back in that era, stuff like that. But because we’re a museum and we’re prominent in the community, stuff kind of comes to us. I have people walk in the door and a guy walk in the door with a bunch of Floyd Collins banners and souvenir memorabilia and sold it to us.

(42:26):

A number of years ago, I’ve got a big plaque that Horse Cave had a monument to Floyd Collins at one time and it had a plaque about Floyd on the wall and it got knocked down by a truck and nobody knew what happened to any of that. And Bill Austin said he had it in one of his barns and it disappeared. Well, this was just a few years ago, long after Bill died and some guy walks in the door with that plaque wants to sell it to him. Well sure we’ll get it back. So we got it back.

Rachelle Wright (43:00):

Wonderful. And so some of those things you all have on display in your regular museum section here?

Dave Foster (43:08):

Yeah, we have a number of newspapers from the Floyd Collins area. I’m wanting to do a little more interpretation on Floyd because I think it’s interesting. We’re actually hoping, we’ve got a lot of construction projects in the work. We’re putting in a riding elevator down into the cave this winter to make it more accessible. We’re wanting to renovate and remodel our back entrance to the museum because that’s where the people park and it’s the least, it’s the most unsightly part of the cave. And then once we get all that done, what I wanting to do is mount a fundraising drive and really upgrade the cave museum exhibits because the exhibits are 30 years old. Exhibit technology has changed dramatically.

Rachelle Wright (43:54):

So much.

Dave Foster (43:55):

We didn’t have digital photography when I started that. I mean, think about that now you can just do so much to enhance photographs to do things. So what we’re wanting to do is a major upgrade of the exhibits. And I’ve got a lot of artifacts that have come to us. I have a collector of Mammoth Cave memorabilia who was a caver in Lexington and bids are auction items when they come up for years. And he was retiring and moving to New Jersey from Lexington and his wife told him he needed to get rid of all that crap. And so he called us up and said, do want any of this? I said, I’ll take it all. And I literally loaded a van load this stuff.

Rachelle Wright (44:36):

It sounds like you all might need another spite building

Dave Foster (44:40):

At some point in time we might

Rachelle Wright (44:43):

To enhance your current

Dave Foster (44:46):

See a time down when we have, most of our upstairs are office space and school space. And I can see the time down the road, but I need to acquiring other buildings to put the offices just to make this space more museum space. I hope we’re that successful. I’d like us to be. We’re finally at a point now where we were in what I would call just survival for 30 years on the brink of bankruptcy. Really more like 35 years,

(45:23):

And then the last four or five years have been the best years we ever had because the pandemic money we had allowed us to buy advertising. And we’re now advertising at a level that we’re not in invisible. And plus we’ve got a much stronger staff now. And because we’re generating more visitors, we have more money for staffing. We have more money for doing conservation work, more money for educational programs. So we’re seeing the organization start to grow and really blossom now.

Rachelle Wright (45:57):

And that’s exciting. And you all do amazing education work. Your education department is excellent.

Dave Foster (46:05):

I think we do. I think we fill a niche that doesn’t get filled here because there are a number of show caves and they’re all marvelous tours. I recommend that people go to, don’t just see one cave, see them all. They’re all different. They’re all unique and they’re marvelous, Mammoth Cave’s marvelous. But the one cave that really is focusing on the pollution and the environmental problems that affect caves is Hidden River Cave because we’re the home base for the American Cave Conservation Association. So if you want to hear a different story than just hear of the pretty formations

Rachelle Wright (46:42):

And a success story because you all were able to take a dying cave.

Dave Foster (46:48):

Yes. We had an article in the Nature Conservancy magazine one time that called us a little bit of the Smithsonian in rural Kentucky and the greatest cave restoration story in the United States. It’s been fun to be part of that.

Rachelle Wright (47:02):

It’s fascinating to learn more about that. That would be another good podcast just about conservation.

Tony Wright (47:09):

I’m just sitting here reminiscing about myself as a child walking the streets and smelling the caves. I remember that

Dave Foster (47:17):

It was bad. There was an insurance office in one of the buildings here above the cave, and the owner of the insurance company told me he called EPA back in the 1970s and was complaining that the fumes from the cave were giving his employees headaches. TJ said, well, we’ll come down and look, but you might not like it. And he said, “Why?” So he said, “We might have to fine you for operating an unsafe work environment.” Like because they have a business on Main Street in Horse Cave that’s within view of the cave. Instead of fixing the problem, we’re going to fine you, really?

Rachelle Wright (47:58):

Things that don’t seem like they would be the correct response in those situations.

Dave Foster (48:05):

And when I came here, I heard all kinds of silly things. I heard that the cave was going to bankrupt the town, the effort to restore the cave and build the museum. We going to bankrupt the town we were going. I had people tell me what’s wrong with the cave being a sewer? What’s the perfect place for a sewer? Just let it be the town sewer. Well, all that water in the cave flows out springs into the Green River, which is an outstanding water resource flows through Mammoth Cave National Park. Do we really want all that to be polluted?

Rachelle Wright (48:38):

I do believe that we are all at a better place of understanding the need at the scientific need of conservation. I think we aren’t where we were before.

Dave Foster (48:48):

And it’s been gratifying to me because when I came here, I was an outsider. I wasn’t from this town. People viewed me suspiciously. Yeah, you’ll work on this a few years and get tired and go somewhere else they think or else they didn’t trust me. And I feel like now that the community embraces me and knows that I did something good for them, and I’ve still got my detractors as we all do, but I don’t feel the same sense of animosity that I did in the first five or 10 years here. It was sort of like, you’re just trying to do this crazy thing. It’s never going to happen. But people, they see the cars coming in the parking lot now and they see the tourists and they see the fact that the tourist eat at the local restaurants and shop at other shops.

Rachelle Wright (49:41):

Sure. It’s an economic driver for the area. And also I think a great sense of pride for the locals now because it is a clean, beautiful place again. And John Muir, of course, stops here.

(49:59):

And he was able to see the beauty of it before everything we’ve just discussed.

Dave Foster (50:05):

Yep. 1867 called it the birthplace of springs and fountains in the dark treasuries of the mineral kingdom.

Rachelle Wright (50:11):

Yeah. Beautiful words. So thank you so much for talking to us today. Tell us you all are a nonprofit.

Dave Foster (50:20):

Yes, we are a non-profit.

Rachelle Wright (50:21):

So people can go to your website and join the efforts of what you all are doing.

Dave Foster (50:28):

Caveconservation.com or www.hiddenrivercave.com. They can find us and we certainly are happy to take donations and we want people to come see us because it’s a really cool cave tour, a neat place.

Rachelle Wright (50:46):

It’s a great cave tour. You all have the Floyd Collins displays and so much information here. If they’re interested in the more information about Floyd and the museum portion of what you all have here is free.

Dave Foster (51:02):

Yes

Rachelle Wright (51:04):

And the Cave tour has a nominal charge and you’ll also have a off trail cave tour

Dave Foster (51:11):

We do

Rachelle Wright (51:12):

Where people can crawl and get the helmets.

Dave Foster (51:15):

We can get you that cave, that Floyd Collins experience really want to get in a tight flights. We had Mike Rowe here with the Ford spokesman that had the Dirty Job show. We put him in a tight little hole down there and we call it the Mike Rowe crawl now because he got stuck in it. I don’t think, think he was acting, but he sounds scared. He’s poor. Pull my feet, pull me out of here. We pulled him out. So that’s the Mike Rowe crawl.

Rachelle Wright (51:46):

Love it.

Dave Foster (51:47):

But it’s been fun. We’ve had the American Pickers guys down here. It’s just you get a lot of people. We get people out of Nashville. We’ve had some Nashville stars come through every now and then.

Rachelle Wright (52:00):

I believe if you’re coming to this area to see Mammoth Cave National Park, it’s a great additional stop to learn more, as you said about the conservation.

Dave Foster (52:11):

Yeah, it’s a different experience. It’s the only cave you’ll see right in the middle of town. I mean Main Street is right here,

Rachelle Wright (52:18):

Right

Dave Foster (52:18):

It’s nice because you walk out of the cave or walk around into other shops and help the community.

Rachelle Wright (52:23):

Get a bite to eat.

Dave Foster (52:25):

Get a bite to eat

Rachelle Wright (52:25):

Absolutely.

Dave Foster (52:26):

So many of the caves across the United States are out, they’re mostly in rural areas. A lot of them. You go 10 miles out of road out in the middle of nowhere.

(52:36):

And this is just kind of unique with it being right in the middle of the town.

(52:40):

And what we really view the, at least we want to see the town and the cave intertwined in a way that everybody benefits and that the town sort of becomes an extension of the cave. We’ve done that some with our walking tour. We have a cell phone walking tour around town where you can walk around the town with a cell phone and you see signs that show pictures of surface buildings and cave. And you can get on your cell phone and it’ll tell you a story about what’s underground and what’s on the surface and talks about some of the historical figures of the town. We’re working on a walking trail around Sunset Dome and on land that we bought and gave to the city. And that’s going to become part a park. Our existing city park we also bought when we bought the cave. And so we’ve got a really nice playground for kids and we bought that because the cave. We restored and saved an old Victorian home that was the Dr. Thomas House, southern Victorian house called the Thomas House. So it’s not just the cave, it’s the whole community and the culture of the community that we feel like we’re part of and we want to expand together.

Rachelle Wright (53:55):

And it’s completely unique in small town America.

Dave Foster (53:58):

Yes, it is. So,

Rachelle Wright (53:59):

Well again, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. We appreciate you.

Dave Foster (54:03):

So did I tell you everything you needed to know about Floyd?

Rachelle Wright (54:06):

I think so.

Tony Wright (54:07):

Absolutely.

Rachelle Wright (54:08):

I think so. We’re excited. Thank you so much.

Dave Foster (54:10):

I’ve got other Floyd Collins stories.

Rachelle Wright (54:14):

If you want to give us one more Okay. And this is the Encore everyone.

Dave Foster (54:18):

I’ll give you one more. Well this is my favorite because I feel like you always hear truth is stranger than fiction.

Rachelle Wright (54:24):

Yes.

Dave Foster (54:25):

It really is. But when Floyd, when they couldn’t get Floyd out of cave, he was down this crevice and Henry Carmichael who had the Kyrock Mining Company

(54:45):

Came in and dug a shaft to try to get to him. They wouldn’t let him do any drilling when the Floyd was still alive because they thought it would collapse a rock. But after he died, they let him dig a shaft and he got down to the body and determined Floyd knew dead and they just left him there. Well, Floyd’s brothers went on the Vaudeville circuit telling the story to raise money to get their brother. And so they finally got Floyd out of the cave and put him in a local cemetery earth. And then Floyd’s dad sold the body to Dr. Thomas, the old cave who had bought, and he sold the cave, sold Crystal Cave and Dr. Thomas began operating Crystal Cave and put Floyd in a glass covered coffin in Crystal Cave. And so the tourists were paying money to see the famous world, famous Floyd Collins and see Crystal Cave. And then apparently a rival cave operator or somebody got jealous, stole Floyd’s body out the cave. And they found him down in the banks of the Green River a little more beat up, quite a bit more beat up. So they put him back in the coffin in the cave and the coffin was right inside the entrance to Crystal Cave. But this time they got rid of the glass covered coffin. I imagine Floyd didn’t look very well at this point.

Rachelle Wright (56:12):

Right.

Dave Foster (56:13):

And they just put a coffin, the wood coffin top, and they stayed there for a long time. And various cave explorers would go in the cave and they had chains around the coffin, but it was just loose enough they could lift it up and peek in. It became kind of a ritual for Cavers. And Floyd stayed there for many years until some Cavers were in Collins Hardware, which was a hardware store right next to Hidden River Cave, which is no longer there. But the Collins that ran the hardware store were Floyd’s great nephews and his wife. And they were just appalled hearing this story about cavers lifting up,

Rachelle Wright (56:56):

Peeking in

Dave Foster (56:57):

And talking to their ancestor. And so they got ahold of Congressman Natcher and lobbied him hard to get Floyd out of the cave. And so the Park Service, Natcher basically got the park series to remove Floyd from Crystal Cave and he’s now in the Mammoth Cave Cemetery. And I always think it’s very curious, can you guess the one day that the Park service chose to bury Floyd Collins the last time, keep in mind Floyd was died in the cave, dug up, put in the ground, dug up, put back in the cave, stolen from the cave, put back in the cave, taken out of the cave, put in the ground, the only man out of the grave more than Jesus Christ, and they buried him the last time or Easter Sunday. Isn’t that a great story?

Rachelle Wright (58:02):

That is a great story. And I have not heard that before.

Dave Foster (58:07):

If he’s going to rise again or not?

Rachelle Wright (58:09):

Time will tell. Time will tell and we’ll be watching. So that’s a great story. Thank you so much. Love that. Okay.

Tony Wright (58:15):

Great Ending, great ending.

Rachelle Wright (58:17):

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Dave Foster (58:18):

You’re welcome.