File:1857 graffiti (Snowball Dining Room, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, USA) 2 - 53605419190.jpg

English: Western Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave is the longest known cave on Earth, with 426 miles of passages currently explored & mapped, as of March 2024. The name “Mammoth Cave” does not refer to its world-record length, nor to the early discovery of mammoth or mastodon fossils here (actually, fossil proboscidean skeletal remains have been reported from this locality). Rather, the name refers to the immense size of many of the rooms and passages.

It is not certain exactly when Mammoth Cave was discovered. A story about its 1797 discovery by a man named Houchins (or Hutchins) is fictional - the park service knows this, but still tells the story during cave tours. However, Mammoth Cave’s earliest acknowledgement in available historical records dates to 1797.

Seen here is mid-19th century graffiti in the famous Snowball Dining Room, a site where meals used to be served to tourists. This unique underground cafeteria was closed in the mid-2010s. The Snowball Dining Room is so named in reference to the irregular hemispherical masses of whitish gypsum on the ceiling. Early accounts likened the room to a site where boys had a snowball fight.

Early tourists often left their names on passage walls or ceilings. This practice (= vandalism) continued well after the area became a park. Methods of leaving a signatures included making scratches, using candle smoke, or using burned, carbonized material as a writing tool.

This graffiti was made on 17 August 1857 by a tourist. The message acknowledges the cave tour guide, Nick Bransford. A fifth-generation descendant of Nick was still a tour guide at Mammoth Cave Park in the 2000s.

The bedrock here is part of the Joppa Member of the Ste. Genevieve Limestone (Middle Mississippian).

Locality: wall of Snowball Dining Room, Cleaveland Avenue, Mammoth Cave Ridge, Mammoth Cave National Park, western Kentucky, USA

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(accessed with park permission)