Gap Cave

Gap Cave has a long history and has carried a variety of names over time. The earliest known name was recorded by Virginia land speculator and explorer Dr. Thomas Walker in April 1750, when he wrote of Cave Gap and described a small entrance to a large cave above a spring, with a constant stream of cool air issuing out. During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate soldiers explored what some called King Solomon's Cave, and drawings, dates, and names they made with candle smoke can still be seen inside; nearby Soldiers' Cave was also used by troops. In 1864 antislavery novelist James T. Trowbridge wrote Cudjo's Cave, a popular Civil War-era melodrama set in Tennessee about two escaped slaves, Cudjo and Pomp, whose secret hideout he called “a Cumberland grotto,” although he never visited the Cumberland Gap region or connected his fictional grotto with Gap Cave. Gap Cave's strong spring later powered a sawmill, a wool-carding mill, a grain mill, and the blast machinery of an iron furnace, and in the mid-1800s nitrates mined there led to the name Saltpeter Cave. As Middlesboro and Harrogate developed in the 1890s, commercial tours began, tourism expanded after electric lights were installed in 1934 and a tunnel connected King Solomon's Cave to Soldiers' Cave, and the joined caves were renamed Cudjo's Cave to associate them with the novel. Private cave operations ended in 1992, after which the National Park Service worked to preserve the cave, restore its appearance, remove the electric lights, and return its oldest name, while park rangers now lead flashlight tours.

Virginia · United States