The community above it took its name from the cave, which tells you how much this place mattered locally. Organ Cave sits in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, and the Organ-Hedricks system it belongs to was registered as a National Natural Landmark in 1973 as the largest cave system in the state. It has since been overtaken and is now third longest, behind Friars Hole in the same county and the Hellhole system in Pendleton County. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2005.
The fossil record here is remarkable: giant ground sloth, grizzly bear, nine-banded armadillo, sabre-tooth cat, reindeer and an Ice Age porcupine have all come out of it. Flint arrowheads show Native people used it. A date of 1704 is scratched on one wall, though that is probably a later addition, since the first white settlers did not reach Greenbrier County until well after.
What the landmark citation singles out, though, is the saltpetre works. Organ Cave contains an exceptional surviving set of saltpetre hoppers and vats, the wooden troughs used to leach nitrate-rich cave earth for gunpowder. It was worked heavily during the Civil War, when the Confederacy was desperately short of powder, and something like three dozen of the hoppers are still standing in the cave. They are among the best preserved anywhere in the country.
The saltpetre operation ran from before 1835, and during the Civil War Confederate soldiers under Robert E. Lee mined the cave for nitre again. The dirt here is unusually high in calcium nitrate, which the hoppers converted into the potassium nitrate that gunpowder needs. What survives is the largest collection of Civil War era saltpetre hoppers in the country.
The National Speleological Society first surveyed it in July 1948, and for many years Organ Cave was considered the longest cave in the world. As of March 2022 the system had 38.452 miles of surveyed passage, which now places it 55th longest in the world and 16th in the United States.
One famous claim about the cave is probably wrong. Thomas Jefferson's giant ground sloth, Megalonyx jeffersonii, was long assumed to have come from here; Jefferson never visited, but was sent the fossil by a local friend in 1796, and in the early twentieth century Andrew Price of Marlinton popularised the idea that Organ Cave was the source. In 1995 the Smithsonian palaeontologist Frederick Grady argued from land ownership records that it actually came from Haynes Cave in Monroe County. In 2008 the governor of West Virginia held a ceremony at Organ Cave declaring the animal the official state fossil and repeated the Organ Cave attribution anyway, without new evidence.
Tours are guided and range from an easy walking route past the saltpetre works to longer wild caving trips into undeveloped passage.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
