DeSoto Caverns

Hernando de Soto's expedition moved through central Alabama in 1540, and the cave eventually took his name — though the record is honest enough to file the visit itself as legend rather than ledger. What is documented: in 1796 Benjamin Hawkins, George Washington's general superintendent for Indian affairs, described the cave in a letter, which makes it the first officially recorded cave in the United States.

During the Civil War the cave worked for the Confederacy as a saltpeter mine — calcium nitrate for gunpowder — and the well Confederate soldiers dug for the operation is still visible underground. In 1912 a group of investors bought the property to mine an onyx vein that proved too poor to pay. One of them, Ida Mathis, an agricultural reformer the papers called the 'Economic Moses of the South,' chose to keep the cave instead of selling it, and her descendants have run it for five generations.

The cave's rowdiest chapter came after the Eighteenth Amendment. Remote but within reach of Birmingham, Kymulga Cave operated in the early 1920s as a speakeasy with gambling and dancing — a literal underground bar. It earned a bad name quickly: repeated shootings and fights gave it the nickname 'The Bloody Bucket,' and bullet holes are still pointed out in the rock formations. Federal agents eventually raided the place and shut it down.

Allen W. Mathis bought sole interest in the property in the mid-1920s and opened the cave to amateur explorers. In 1965 the family leased it to Fred Layton, who built steps, added electric lights, and opened it to the public as Kymulga Onyx Cave — just as Interstate 75 drew the tourist traffic elsewhere. Mathis's son and grandson took over in 1975, renamed the site DeSoto Caverns in 1976, and saw it listed on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage the same year. Rebranded in recent years as Majestic Caverns, it now draws 80,000 to 100,000 visitors annually.

This is one of those dossiers where the documented record does most of the work. A burial ground used for two millennia, a frontier trader signing the wall, a gunpowder works, a saloon with bullet holes in the stone — the cave kept everything. Local lore files the softer reports: figures glimpsed in the main room, the sort of sighting retold at the ticket counter and verified nowhere. The register notes them the way it notes everything — without ruling on them.

What can be said on the record is simpler: the oldest graffiti and some of the oldest burials in American caving share the same dark, and the cave has outlasted every use anyone has found for it.