Dunbar Cave State Park

The cave at Dunbar was a sacred place long before it was a park. Tennessee State Parks points to the 800-year-old Mississippian artwork inside and calls the cave a sacred place for Indigenous people, which is why photography is not allowed on the tours. Archaeologists working here in the late 1970s found artifacts from the Paleo-Indian period onward, most of them Archaic, so people had been coming to this opening in the limestone for thousands of years.

The resort years came in layers. Cabins went up beside the cave and nearby Idaho Springs in 1858, and after the Civil War J. A. Tate built a two-story hotel and sold the spring water as a cure. People came for dances, concerts, fairs and camp meetings; Jim Shelton, an African American barber and musician, was one of the popular performers. In the 1930s Clarksville businessmen enlarged the lake to about twenty acres and added a pool, and big bands such as Benny Goodman's and Tommy Dorsey's played here. Roy Acuff bought the property in 1948 and performed on it regularly. The hotel was gone by 1950, the pool closed in 1967, and the state took the land in 1973.

The concrete arches at the cave and Swan Lake are what the resort left behind, and the Lake Trail is good for waterfowl in spring and fall. In summer the cave mouth breathes cool air and an eastern phoebe nests there. Going inside takes a guided tour, offered from May through September. Reserve ahead, because tours often sell out.