Mammoth Cave National Park

Indigenous peoples

Paleo-Indians hunted in the Green River valley more than 10,000 years ago. Between about 5,000 and 1,500 years ago, the park’s 2021 ethnographic overview reports, people ventured more than a mile into Mammoth and Salts caves to live, explore, mine minerals, hold ceremonies and bury their dead; the caves preserved their textiles, torch material and plant remains, some of the best evidence of early plant domestication in Kentucky, from sunflower and goosefoot to squash. The park brochure gives a narrower span, 4,000 to 2,000 years ago, and notes cane reed torches preserved in drier passageways. Seven federally recognized tribes claim the area as ancestral land: the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Cherokee Nation, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, Absentee Shawnee Tribe, Eastern Shawnee Tribe, Shawnee Tribe and Chickasaw Nation. The overview notes the park has never systematically studied their oral histories of the place. [2] [4]

Black history

After emancipation Black guides kept working the cave, and the Bransfords and their descendants guided there for over 100 years, while other Black workers were limited to jobs such as porter, cook and laundress. Tours were almost completely segregated. In 1921 Matt and Zemmie Bransford opened a 14-room summer resort on Flint Ridge for Black travelers; the Kentucky National Park Commission bought it for $3,000 in December 1934 to make way for the park. [2] [3]

A Black CCC company, camp NP-1, spent 12,000 man-days on cave improvements, completing 24 miles of trails. Yet by the end of 1939 every Black guide had been forced to retire, and when the Park Service took over the tours none were rehired, including Clifton, Arthur, Eddie, Elzie and George Bransford, leaving an all-white guide force for the first time since 1838. [3]

Slavery

From the early 1790s through the War of 1812, the park’s 2023 historic resource study reports, an estimated 70 enslaved workers, many leased from surrounding counties, dug and hauled nitrate-bearing dirt by torchlight and stood in leaching vats stirring it; the cave produced 300 to 500 pounds of saltpetre a day. [3]

Enslaved men also became its renowned guides. From 1838 Stephen Bishop, guiding at 17, and Mat and Nick Bransford, owned or leased by the cave’s owners, led tours that could last up to 18 hours. Bishop was the first to cross the Bottomless Pit and drew a map of the cave from memory, published in 1845. Owner John Croghan’s will valued Bishop at $600, his wife Charlotte at $450 and their son Thomas at $100, freeing them seven years after his death; they gained freedom in 1856, and Bishop died the next year. [2] [3]