In the early twentieth century, businessmen throughout Cave Country were opening and developing show caves at a rampant pace. The most ambitious of these developers, though, all had a common goal in mind. Despite the success that many caves along the road experienced, no tourist traveled all the way to rural Kentucky to visit just any old cave (no matter how beautiful or grand they were). Visitors came to Cave Country to see the greatest cave in the world. Mammoth Cave was their ultimate destination. If a cave developer wanted to find more than short-term success in the cave business, then they had to find their own piece of the region’s greatest attraction. Ambitious cave developers aggressively searched for caves that might somehow prove to connect to Mammoth Cave. And in the early twentieth century, no cave developer was more ambitious or more successful than George D. Morrison.
George Morrison came to Mammoth Cave in 1915 to pursue oil deposits that had recently been found in the cave region. While he was an oil man by trade, George had been remarkably unsuccessful. On one occasion, George made nineteen successive attempts to find oil that came up dry. His reputation and his pocketbook were both badly marred, his failures earning him the nickname “Dry Hole George.” Upon his arrival to Cave Country, however, he soon abandoned his search for oil and found new opportunity in the form of cave development. After all, in the region around Mammoth Cave even dry holes could make a man rich.
George’s approach to the search for distant, undiscovered reaches of Mammoth Cave was innovative and brave compared to the methods employed by his fellow cave diggers. Common practice for developers trying to strike it rich was to go digging and poking around any hole in the ground that might somehow lead in the direction of Mammoth Cave. Great effort and large sums of money were devoted to many of these leads, but they all turned out to be unsuccessful. George, on the other hand, had a different plan in mind. If he was to find a distant stretch of Mammoth Cave, not owned by the Mammoth Cave Estate, which could be developed, then the best place to start looking was inside Mammoth Cave itself.
Illegal entry into Mammoth Cave was difficult and dangerous, but George was persistent. The Mammoth Cave Estate was on the lookout for anyone who would try to “steal the cave away” and, before long, were on to George Morrison and his survey crew. Despite run-ins with the Estate and even the law, Morrison continued to find ways to enter the cave and push the most distant passages into the unknown. By the next year, George was successful. In 1916, his survey crew located a passage beyond the property lines of the Mammoth Cave Estate and near the surface, and an entrance was blasted in the region’s most famous cave. For decades, folks had tried to force their way into Mammoth Cave, but within just a year of his arrival, the relatively inexperienced George Morrison had accomplished the impossible!
Unfortunately for George, the cavern rights to the land above his entrance had already been purchased by the L&N Railroad, who were unwilling to allow a new competitor to steal their business away from their other caves in the region. The ambitious cave developer had neglected to account for the other powerful rival in the region and was forced to close his entrance and abandon his work. In 1916, George Morrison left Cave Country and the Mammoth Cave Estate was spared from their greatest nightmare.
George, however, did not lose his persistence. While away from the area, he began assembling investors to help him acquire land and cavern rights around Mammoth Cave. With the financial backing of the newly-formed Mammoth Cave Development Company, George returned in 1921, prepared to give the cave business another shot. Using survey notes from five years earlier, help from locals, and indications on the surface of passages below, George began blasting into the bottom of a sink further down the Mammoth Cave Ridge. With luck and expertise on his side, George found vertical passages beneath the sink at Doyel’s Big Break and the search for Mammoth Cave resumed at a feverish pace. Within a few weeks, George’s persistence finally payed off. His nephew, Earl Morrison, along with Carl Nickerson and other local explorers emerged into a large, dry room to find writing on the wall. Five years after defeat at the Cox Entrance (George’s first attempt), they were back in Mammoth Cave!
George Morrison was back in business and wasted little time opening and developing the New Entrance to Mammoth Cave for tours. In spring of 1922, work began on a Grand Staircase to deliver visitors down the 250 feet of pits and domes leading to Grand Central Station (the large, dry room they had found at the bottom of the pits and domes). By May, his workers had completed the staircase and a more distant, undisturbed section of Mammoth Cave was opened to the public. George’s tours not only featured newly discovered parts of the region’s greatest cave, but also many of the most distant and rarely seen features that had been discovered through the Old Entrance. Tours featured Hovey’s Cathedral Domes, Robertson Avenue, and the Grand Avenue, all places previously seen only by Mammoth Cave’s most adventurous guides and visitors. Now, they were accessible to anyone and George reaped the profits.
Despite legal battles and attempts to close him down, George Morrison and the New Entrance prospered. For many years, George continued to explore and develop the remote stretch of Mammoth Cave and became the greatest competition for the heirs of Dr. John Croghan and the Mammoth Cave Estate. He aggressively promoted his cave in books and along the roads. Competitors scrambled to keep up and battles moved from the courtrooms to the roadsides. George Morrison ushered in the greatest era of competition and changed the dynamic in Cave Country. The gloves were off and even the greatest cave in the world had to fight for its life if its owners hoped to survive the Kentucky Cave Wars.
The Kentucky Cave Wars 
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