On 12 November 1871, John Gehret and William Merkel were blasting limestone out of a steep hill near Kutztown, in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, to spread on neighbouring farms. One dynamite charge opened a hole big enough to walk through. Newspapers shortly declared the result more beautiful than the famous Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and locals began letting themselves in and helping themselves to the calcite and aragonite crystals as souvenirs. That looting is why the cave survived. A Greenwich Township farmer, Samuel Kohler, bought the cave and 47 acres around it for $5,000 in early 1872 and put a wooden door on it to keep people out. On 25 May that year, six months after the discovery, he opened it properly to the public with a ceremony he called the Grand Illumination of the Crystal Cave and hired the Greenwich Cornet Band to play. He began charging admission the following year. That makes it the first show cave to open in Pennsylvania and one of the oldest continuously operating show caves in the United States, running for more than 150 years. It is a compact limestone cavern rather than a sprawling system, and its reputation rests on concentration rather than scale: flowstone, stalactites and crystal lined rooms packed into a short route, lit for guided tours. One practical note. There are two Crystal Caves on this map, this one and Wisconsin's longest cave near Spring Valley, and they are frequently confused. This is the Berks County one, in Richmond Township, and it keeps a steady temperature in the mid fifties Fahrenheit with a fair number of steps on the tour.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
