History
What is now known as Illinois Caverns hosted its first paying customers in March 1901, operated by a Mr. White of East Saint Louis. It is the only cave in Illinois to have been commercially operated, attracting many visitors from St. Louis during the 1904 World's Fair. However the cave was never considered a commercial success (it closed in 1907), and had remained almost completely unimproved, excepting the extant concrete entrance stairs and a single ladder. When the cave and environs were sold to the State of Illinois in 1985, care of the site was entrusted to Armin Krueger, until his death.
Read more about this topic: Illinois Caverns State Natural Area
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)