In the days before battery powered light, caver explorers wore lamps fueled by carbide gas.

National Cave Museum

Park City, Kentucky

Show caves -- the ones with tour guides and cleared walkways -- have lured American tourists underground for hundreds of years. They're exotic, mysterious, cool in summer and warm in winter. It's not surprising that these venerable attractions have produced many maps, posters, post cards, and souvenirs.

Atrium of the fireproof National Cave Museum.

But we had no idea how many until we visited the National Cave Museum.

The museum is the vision of Gordon Smith, a show cave owner who began collecting cave memorabilia in 1968. "The kids didn't want it," he said jokingly of his collection, "so I had to do something with it." It took 50 years before Gordon and a group of like-minded preservationists opened the museum in 2018.

There's a long history of cave lodges being destroyed by fire (along with their collections of cave artifacts), so the museum was built with no combustable parts. "It's as fireproof as we could make it," said Gordon of the building. "There's no wood. The walls and floor are concrete. The trusses are all steel. You could drive a truck on the roof."

The museum's most iconic (and inflammable) relic is one of the first things that visitors see inside the front door: the death rock of Floyd Collins, which trapped and killed the famous cave explorer in 1925. The surprisingly small rock quickly became an attraction itself, and was worn smooth by the hands of countless tourists who later touched and held it (for a small fee, of course).

The infamous rock that killed celebrity cave explorer Floyd Collins.

"That rock determines the length of the tour that we give to people," said Gordon. "If someone comes in and says, 'Who's this Floyd Collins guy and what the hell is this rock?' then that person gets the two-minute tour. But if they come in the front door and cry, 'My God! You've got the rock!' then they get the two-hour tour."

Sad Collins head ponders photo of tourists holding his death rock.

Two minutes in the museum still provides a memorable glimpse of the collection. There are plates, ashtrays, and creamers made of delicate ruby and blue cobalt glass and porcelain, often hand-painted with cave scenes ("The good ones were imported from Germany," said Gordon). Many of these antique show cave souvenirs are from the dawn of commercial tourism, and were made so that homeowners would proudly display them, advertising a cave to guests who would then want to visit it themselves.

Also on display are sheet music ("Crazy Cave") and pamphlets ("Subterranean Wonders"); a bottle of coffee found on Floyd Collins' body; vintage carbide-fueled caving lamps; two showcases devoted to Mammoth Cave Whiskey; and stalactites ripped out of anonymous caves, painted with the names of ones that were more famous, and then sold to unsuspecting tourists. Walls are hung with old outdoor metal signs advertising long-forgotten show caves. "A lot of them have bullet holes," said Gordon. "The more bullet holes they have, the more we like them."

Gordon told us that the museum once displayed the 19th century stagecoach that took visitors from the local train station to nearby Mammoth Cave. Gordon offered to trade it for "Lost John," Mammoth Cave's famous prehistoric mummy. The offer was declined, and Gordon was then asked to give back the stagecoach (It's now on display inside the Mammoth Cave lodge). "Lost John is still in the cave, but he's been moved into a side passage where no one can see him," said Gordon, who admitted that this was probably the best result. The mummy, preserved for centuries by its cave environment, might have fallen apart in the museum.

100 years ago you could pour milk into your tea with a show cave souvenir creamer.

More fun cave facts that we learned from Gordon: 1) Every state in the U.S. has at least one cave, including flat and tiny Delaware, and Gordon has been in most of them; 2) The relatively obscure Blanchard Springs Caverns in Arkansas is, in Gordon's opinion, "probably the best cave in the United States;" 3) Virginia's Luray Caverns has so many tourists that it has to be vacuumed every night to remove their clothing lint; 4) The reason that the rocks no longer "talk" in Missouri's Talking Rock Caverns is that moisture in the cave ate the loudspeakers.

A cave wedding hand-painted plate was a treasured keepsake.

The museum's public displays, while impressive, are "just a representative sample," according to Gordon. Where the museum really overwhelms is in its many private side rooms, which hold the bulk of the collection. Hundreds of locked, fireproof file cabinets are filled with binders that bulge with countless cave brochures, guidebooks, and postcards. "There are 10,000 cave postcards on eBay as we speak," said Gordon. "Many times I come in here and pull a binder to see if I have one that's for sale. I don't want duplicates." Gordon rolled out drawers of blueprint-scale flat files, offering brief glimpses of one-of-a-kind cave posters, maps, and oversized photographs. "That's me!" he said, pointing to a tiny human figure in a vast subterranean room.

Rooms are packed with original cave oil paintings in elegant frames, shelves of fiction books ("Talk about too much damn literature," said Gordon), archival boxes filled with cave plays and melodramas. The most disaster-proof storage is reserved for items that are "excruciatingly rare," according to Gordon. Here are faded photographs of early cave tour guides and explorers, the personal diaries of cave owners, and the original account ledger of a famous show cave that, Gordon said, cost the museum "more than my house."

Cave-made music: a niche genre of the recording industry.

One entire room is devoted to what Gordon called "the three-dimensional stuff." Among them are the cave souvenirs: pins, plates, bottles, buttons, hats, mugs, coins, keychains, cigarette lighters, shot glasses, snow globes, belt buckles, ceramic figurines, egg cups, ladies' compacts, mirrors, paperweights, thermometers, and hundreds of vintage metal "toppers" that were screwed above automobile license plates in the days before bumper stickers.

"It's amazing how much material caves produce," Gordon said. "Zillions of things. It can be overwhelming." There's a collection of antique stereopticons that includes, said Gordon, 42 different 3-D views of Floyd Collins' funeral. There are drawer after drawer of 100-year-old show cave souvenir jewelry and elaborate silver souvenir spoons. "Beautiful, handmade, priceless," said Gordon. "They're so delicate. I wonder how they ever survived."

Everything is meticulously labeled in Gordon's very neat penmanship, and we complimented him on his organization. "Yeah, it only took me about 60 years," he wisecracked with a laugh. "I hope someone takes care of it 60 years from now."