The Fantastic Caverns billboards on the way to Springfield, MO finally wore me down after two trips and I decided to check it. I went on a Wednesday afternoon and managed to get a private tour of what isn’t the best cavern I’ve ever been to, but it sure was the largest! They are so big, you ride through them in a jeep.
The caves were discovered in the middle of the Civil War, but the owner didn’t tell anyone about them until two years after the war ended. Then he put an ad in the paper asking if anyone wanted to explore them to see how big they were. Apparently he was quite surprised when the local athletic club answered his ad and ended up being a group of 16 teenage girls who went spelunking all the time. The wrote their names on the cave after they explored it.
The most interesting stories about the caves came during prohibition when they added the big door and turned the caves into a speakeasy. Years later it was turned into a music venue and Buck Owens would play in the cave twice a week for years. Then the Presley family took over the venue for time before they started running tours through it.
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