Onondaga Cave

In 1886 a man named Charles Christopher was studying the spring that powered the local mill on the Meramec River and worked out that there was a cave behind the water. He borrowed a boat, took two friends, John Eaton and Mitis Horine, and spent a whole day exploring the passages. Then he and Eaton bought the land over the cave and started developing it as the Mammoth Cave of Missouri.

That is where it gets complicated. William Davis owned the mill and the spring, and the resulting property dispute over who owned what ran for more than fifty years. It is one of the longest running cave ownership fights in the country, and it turned on the awkward fact that the cave entrance and the cave itself were not necessarily in the same hands.

The commercial pressure of the era did not help. Cave onyx was fashionable in architecture and caves across the region were being stripped for it, so a disputed cave was a cave at risk.

Onondaga survived, and it is now the centrepiece of a Missouri state park established in 1982, about five miles southeast of Leasburg on the Meramec. The cave is heavily decorated, with stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone and rimstone-dammed pools, and a stream running through it toward the spring that gave it away in the first place.

The park is more than the cave. It covers river frontage on the Meramec with camping, fishing, swimming, hiking and picnicking, and a second cave, Cathedral Cave, lies within the park boundary. Onondaga tours are guided, on a lit path with a fair number of stairs.