Civil War
Lost River Cave served as a camp for both Union and Confederate troops in this area. Lost River offered a natural water supply and the beauty of the cave provided a diversion from the ugliness of war. On one of his “lightning raids” into Kentucky, John Hunt Morgan allegedly hid in the cave when escaping from pursuing troops.
Nearly 40,000 Union soldiers camped around Lost River Cave & Valley from 1862-1865. An oasis in difficult times, the cave and river provided a cool respite from blistering heat in the summers. The men enjoyed the cave just as the Confederate troops had in their down time. They crawled through the underground network of passages and wrote their names, ranks and companies on the ceilings and walls of the cave. They even fired their guns inside the cave passages to hear the echoes, leaving behind their bullets for historic archaeologists to find more than a century later.
Read more about this topic: Lost River Cave
Famous quotes related to civil war:
“They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.”
—Derek Mahon (b. 1941)
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)