Marvel Cave (Silver Dollar City)

Marvel Cave was a mine before it was a show. Henry T. Blow, a St. Louis lead magnate, led six miners down the sinkhole in 1869 looking for lead ore. They found none, but took the flat ceiling of one room for marble, and the name Marble Cave stuck. In 1884 T. Hodges Jones bought the property and formed the Marble Cave Mining and Manufacturing Company, and a geologist proved the marble was limestone. The company mined bat guano instead, hauling it out by pulley and selling it for fertilizer and gunpowder until it ran out in 1889. Its hilltop town, Marmaros, was left empty and later burned.

William Henry Lynch, a Canadian miner and dairyman, bought the cave and a square mile around it in October 1889 for $10,000 and began tours in 1894: eight hours by candle or lantern, starting down a 100-foot ladder. After he died in 1927 his daughters ran it and renamed it Marvel Cave. Hugo Herschend of Chicago leased it in 1950. His widow, Mary, and sons Jack and Peter laid concrete paths, built a cable train in 1957 to haul visitors back up, and in 1960 rebuilt Marmaros on the surface. That village became Silver Dollar City. Genevieve Lynch left the cave in 1972 to the College of the Ozarks and the First Presbyterian Church of Branson.

Tours start in the Cathedral Room, one of the largest cave entrance rooms in North America, and go down to the Waterfall Room, about 500 feet below the surface.