By GayNelle Doll
In 1897 two Vanderbilt students summering just south of Nashville on the Cumberland Plateau made an accidental discovery that eventually would draw millions of Americans to a vast subterranean world during much of the 20th century. For motorists traveling the Dixie Highway between the Midwest and Florida, Wonder Cave literally was the coolest thing coming and going—a year-round 55 degrees.
Monteagle, Tennessee, still a popular weekend escape today, was the area’s largest summer resort a hundred years ago. Its elevation of around 2,000 feet promised city folks respite from the summer heat. The mountain town, served by the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway, was a 90-mile train ride from Vanderbilt. For those seeking culture or enlightenment, the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly was the Southern headquarters for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. And Monteagle was within spitting distance of Sewanee, home of the University of the South, Vanderbilt’s first football rival.
During the summer of 1897, Vanderbilt students H. Melville Anderson (attended 1896–98) and Will Fitzgerald, BA 1897, along with their friend Robert A. Nelson, spent the summer in and around Monteagle. Fitzgerald was the son of Methodist Bishop O.P. Fitzgerald; Anderson’s mother had a summer cottage at Monteagle.
One afternoon as Anderson and Nelson were returning from fishing, they stopped for water at a spring three miles north of Monteagle. Curious as to the origin of the cool stream, they began exploring beneath a huge limestone cliff and found what appeared to be the entrance to a cave.
The next day they returned with Fitzgerald to explore further. A 1910 Chattanooga Times article recounted their discovery: “It was their intention to wade up-stream with torches as far as the overhanging cliffs would permit, the cliffs being about three feet above the surface of the stream at the entrance. They waded in water up to their armpits for a distance of about two hundred feet when they found themselves in an enormous underground chamber. They proceeded on dry land through a hallway one-half mile in length, the river flowing along the margin of the walk.”
Tennessee, according to the Nature Conservancy, has more caves than any other state—more than 10,000, or 20 percent of the country’s known caves. But this one was something special: 15 miles of beautiful caverns.
“In my opinion, [Wonder Cave] is more splendid than any on the continent,” wrote F.J. Sessions for the Chattanooga Times in 1900. “The approach to it from Monteagle is over historic ground, for it lies in a valley through which Forrest’s army and that of Bragg passed on their way south after the battle of Stones River. … Both roads are up rugged steeps where now it seems almost impossible to urge a loose horse.”
Writing in 1912, geologist Wilbur A. Nelson noted that the cave had two entrances, both of which required spelunkers to wade through a stream for several hundred feet. “These conditions must have kept the Indians from entering the main part of the cave, for absolutely no signs of Indians or any prehistoric animals have ever been found within it.”
A year after the Vanderbilt students discovered it, businessman Robert M. Payne of South Pittsburg, Tennessee, purchased Wonder Cave and turned it into Tennessee’s first commercial cave. Describing the acquisition in a 1907 letter, Payne recalled: “I visited the cave in company with some yellow-fever refugees from Jackson, Mississippi, and was so favorably impressed with what I saw that I at once bought the cave with the right to explore and improve it with a view of exhibiting it to visitors.”
A Sewanee graduate, coal-mining entrepreneur, and owner of a Monteagle hotel, Payne built a toll road so horses and buggies could reach the cave. He enlarged the entrance, lit the cave with acetylene gas, and began giving tours by 20-passenger flat-bottomed boat. Payne also built a steam pump that forced spring water up to the hotel and the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly. He gave the fantastic formations found within Wonder Cave names like Devil’s Play Ground, Cave of the Cyclops and Cleopatra’s Canopy. And he ornamented the cave with religious statuary.
In 1929, J.J. Raulston took over operation of Wonder Cave, adding a two-story log house that served as gift shop, ticket office and private residence. As more Americans acquired automobiles, signs along Highway 41—the main road, known as the Dixie Highway—beckoned motorists to the site, just half a mile from the road. In its heyday Wonder Cave attracted more visitors than Ruby Falls, recording more than 40,000 visitors in 1961 alone.
Just as the advent of the automobile had attracted tourists, however, the completion of Interstate 24 two miles from the cave diverted motorists who were more interested in making good time than in viewing stalactites. In 1962 cave attendance plummeted by 90 percent and never recovered.
Raulston’s son continued operating the cave until 1980, when it was sold to Chattanooga businessman Bruce Born. Born’s sister, Julia, operated the cave facilities as a bed and breakfast until around 2000. In 1987 it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. By the time it closed at the end of the 20th century, an estimated 2 million visitors had toured Wonder Cave. The cave remains in the Born family today.
The Vanderbilt students who discovered the cave never received a great deal of publicity for their find. A 1931 Vanderbilt Alumnus article about area caves by E.R. Pohl, assistant professor of geology, calls Wonder Cave “well toward the top of the fine onyx caves of the country,” but never even mentions Nelson or Fitzgerald.
Today the only visible reminders of Wonder Cave’s glory days are a couple of faded roadside signs and a handful of forlorn religious statues haunting the site’s former entrance, which is off-limits to visitors.
GayNelle Doll is the former editor of Vanderbilt Magazine. She retired in 2015.