Karst Conservancy's Cavernous Concert

A couple summers ago, I lamented here that Bluegrass concerts inside Rockcastle County's Great Saltpetre Cave, once a great Kentucky tradition, are no longer being performed.


Good news for modern man: the Bluegrass is back! Coming this August, the Music in the Mountain fundraising show will finally put the cave's Echo Auditorium, a huge underground chamber that makes a perfect concert hall, to good use again. The show will feature music by the Renfro Valley Performers doing their "Front Porch Pickin' Show", and the proceeds go to helping maintain and preserve the region's amazing caves and karst.

The show is August 20 at pm, and tickets must be purchased in advance. Call 800.765.7464. Map and directions are here.

(photo at top by Nathan Williams.)

Fort Knox is Burning

Over the weekend, a massive fire-fighting effort has been underway to douse the flames that have been sweeping hundreds of acres at Fort Knox. No one's certain how it started, but some are saying that the fires probably started after tracer rounds were fired during military exercises. This is ammo enhanced with pyrotechnic materials that allow the paths of the projectiles to be clearly seen as they sail through the air.

According to the Courier-Journal, at least 87 drops of water have been performed by Blackhawk helicopters. There's conflicting reports online at the moment, some saying that the fires have all been contained, while others indicate that some are still burning. Fire departments that have provided assistance include Bullitt County, Flaherty, Lebanon Junction, Nichols, PRP, Rineyville, and Zoneton.

Another fire, at the Fort Duffield Civil War Park in West Point, KY, is believed to have been also sparked by the Fort Knox conflagration. According to WHAS:

The WHAS11 crew walked up a hill inside the park to get a closer look at the now-controlled flames and saw firsthand the damage the fire caused. The blaze was so hot, it did something no one working the fire said they had ever seen before; melted a portion of one man’s helmet.

The considerable smoke lingering over the southern part of Jefferson County has been very bad to breathe, with air quality ratings in Valley Station reaching undesirable levels.

The Kentucky Forestry Division reports that 42 fires in 31 counties occurred last week. 15 of those were in Rockcastle County, where
Judge-Executive Buzz Carloftis issued a total ban on all open fires, including trash fires, camp bonfires, and controlled burnoffs on public and private land.

In addition to being a major training base for the U.S. Army, Fort Knox also supposedly houses the nation's gold bullion supply. I say "supposedly" because there's been a growing concern in some circles that the gold is actually missing. There have been reports of "gold" ingots discovered to be composed primarily of tungsten, a metal whose weight is close enough to gold for the brick to pass the flotation test.

There have been repeated calls for an independent audit of Fort Knox's gold since the Reagan administration, but the Federal Reserve has stonewalled these efforts each time. And as market analyst Gary North wisely notes, the Fed may have good reason to be in damage-control mode, as a chain reaction of worldwide financial upheaval could ensue:

"If all the gold is not there, there will be enormous pressure from voters on governments around the world to audit the gold reserves of their central banks. If the gold held in trust by the New York Fed is not there, foreign voters will conclude that their governments' gold may not be there either."

Things may be getting even hotter for Fort Knox if the gold-audit proponents get their way, and that's a fire that shows no signs of being put out.

Missing Hands (and other stuff)

With a topic like this, I thought maybe this would be a good occasion to use this image of Kali.

UnK reader "Old" posted a comment to yesterday's entry about the mysterious death of Secret Service agent Gary Joe Bergsen:

"I don't know if you know much about this, but there have been reports of people going missing in between Jackson County and Rockcastle County in recent years and if they find the bodies they generally find that their hands have been cut off."

Well, removal of a corpse's hands is an antiquated gangster-style method of making identification of a body difficult, apparently done by persons who forgot about toeprints, teeth, DNA, and other identifying factors. I don't know of any instances of it of occuring down in Jackson/Rockcastle counties, but I don't doubt that such cases exist. We tend to only hear about the ones where the bodies remain unclaimed and unidentified, on websites that keep track of John Does and Cold Case Files, such as:

Henderson: "The remains of a severely beaten young man who had his hands and feet cut off and his teeth knocked out remain unidentified despite an earlier, false identification in 2007 that named the victim as Indianapolis area resident Scott Michael Morris."

Madison County: "1993. White male between 25 and 30. Asphyxia from bag tied around head with belt. Missing hands. ESTIMATED YEAR OF BIRTH 1963-68."

Grant County: "1989. White male in 30's. 6 1/2 feet tall and weighed 220 lbs. Body found in tobacco barn. Hands cut off and multiple gunshot wounds, blow to the head. ESTIMATED YEAR OF BIRTH 1949-59."

Last November, I also reported on a case where the body of a male with hands and feet removed was found in a briar thicket in Daviess County.

Allman's Beer Cheese

Beer cheese lovers and Boonesboro historians rejoice! The ghost of the birthplace of beer cheese, Johnny Allman's Restaurant, comes back to haunt the 21st century, thanks to Johnny's grandson Ian and the original formula for Johnny's historic beer cheese.

That's right, you heard right, Allman's Beer Cheese is back! According to their website:

Johnny Allman began his historical restaurant career in the late 1930's on the banks of the Kentucky river near Boonesborough. After retiring as a captain in the Kentucky Highway Patrol (and personal aid to two Kentucky governors) , he opened his first restaurant, The Driftwood Inn. It was here that Johnny and his cousin Joe developed the first batch of beer cheese ever made.

Johnny moved his site of operation to the site of present day Hall's Restaurant in the early 1940's and after a while sold the business to Carl Johnson. Upon the sale, he agreed to stay out of the restaurant business on the river for five years. During this time away from the river he opened The Smokehouse on US 25 in Madison county near the Blue Grass Army Depot during the Korean War. After that location he moved to North Broadway in Lexington to open an Allman's Restaurant during the construction of IBM. He again sold that restaurant and moved for the last time back to the Kentucky river and built on a site located between his two previous locations. Johnny ran this last Allman's Restaurant until 1978 when the business burned and he retired. The last genuine Allman's beer cheese was served at this location.

In the past thirty-odd years many versions of beer cheese have popped up on store shelves and on the tables of regional restaurants. But now, "the beer cheese that started it all" is available again in its original unaltered recipe made by Johnny's grandson Ian Allman. Thirty years hasn't changed a thing. Allman's Beer Cheese is owned and operated by Ian Allman and his wife Angie who reside in Rockcastle County.

This is a brand-new product launch, so distribution is just getting started. Right now it's only available at Better Beef on Chestnut St. in Berea, but I expect that's all about to change shortly. I haven't tried it yet, but am eager to get my hands of a tub of it and will no doubt be raving about it here soon.

The Great Saltpetre Cave

Discovered in the late 18th century, the Great Saltpetre Cave was immediately utilized for its mass quantities of saltpetre, which was used to manufacture gunpowder. According to Wikipedia:

During the War of 1812, sixty to seventy men were employed to mine the cave of its saltpeter, deemed necessary as British blockades prevented saltpeter shipments from overseas. Many of the workers at the cave were slaves. To a lesser degree the cave was also mined during the Mexican-American War and the Civil War.

For a time, ending in the 1970s, Great Saltpetre Cave was a commercial cave, and was open not only for tours, but also for ballroom dances, a museum, and weddings. However, the guests would often damage the cave formations by taking souvenirs.

You can't believe everything you read on Wikipedia, however. The Great Saltpetre Cave actually continued to be available for weddings, and for a yearly Mother's Day event, right up into the 1990s.

Today the Great Saltpetre Cave is owned by the Rockcastle Karst Conservancy, as part of the 300-acre Great Saltpetre Preserve. Sadly, Bluegrass concerts, as shown in the photo above, are no longer held there. The Renfro Valley Barn Dance held its inaugural radio broadcast in the cave in 1939.

Climax Cave

I've been in many Kentucky caves but I don't think Rockcastle County's Climax Cave is one of them. I just happened to read about it tonight while researching something else, as so often happens with this here internet thingie.

Someone named Jenna Martin has a very interesting report of a trip to the cave in 2000, an excerpt from which follows:

Climax is one of those caves that, once you get to a certain landmark, you can wander around the many passages and not get lost because they all, for the most part, lead back to that main room. We did some exploring. We sat in one passageway for a bit and let the bats zoom by our faces. And we carried on some deep, philosophical discussions while we crawled through the mud. Good times. Around 1 am, we decided to head for the exit. With some caves, you have to exit where you came in because the passage eventually becomes impassible. Climax, though, has a separate exit that spits us out into a hilly cow field with a winding trail that brings us about a mile down the road from the church. In the middle of the night, you not only have to watch out for giant cow patties all over the place, but you also have to pass one of those ancient, scary-movie cemeteries with the complimentary creaking iron gated archway while hearing what we imagine to be wild, rabid dogs barking and howling in the not-so-distant distance. Creepy as hell, but if you call yourself a caver, you've gotta at least pretend you've got some balls.

We turned the last corner before we got to the exit. Before us, lining the 30 foot high and about 50 foot wide mouth of Climax, were about 100 or so lit candles. For years and years, this area has been thought to be highly paranormally active. (Not to mention all of the creepy "Deliverance" parallels we've noticed, on occasion.) Spirit hunters attribute ghost sightings and strange events to civil war activities that occurred in the area, extreme suffering of people living and dying in these "hollows", and the bizarre fundamentalist religions and occult rituals that were practiced by reclusive clans of Kentucky mountain people.

Climax Cave can be entered by way of an opening near the Climax Baptist Church, which is located in the small town of Climax, KY (home of Climax Mountain Spring Water). If you go, note that Climax Cave is closed from September through April, to allow the indigenous population of endangered Indiana Bats some quality alone-time.

Climax Cave is 1.554 miles long, which puts it at #626 in the Top 1000 Longest Caves in the USA.


These photos were filched from here. Click it to see some more great photos of Climax Cave.

The Nameless Grocery

This grocery store is located in Wildie, KY, Rockcastle county. It bears no sign and has no name, and gives no indication that it is in business of any sort, aside from the Pepsi machine on the front porch. Last time we were inside the store, there was actually very little for sale except a rack of snack cakes, some bread and produce, and some soda. The store is often full of old-timers sitting around talking conspiratorially. I dug it.

Disputanta Post Office

Disputanta, KY is a spooky little place in the mountains of Rockcastle County. Aside from its rural residents, there isn't much left here except a church, a graveyard or two, and this lovely old abandoned post office.

There is an old legend that Satan comes to visit Disputanta every Autumn, and novelist Johnny Payne used this legend as the basis for his play "The Devil In Disputanta".