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.
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Famous quotes related to civil war:
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)