I remember playing on the hillside behind my grandparents’ house and finding holes in the ravines that my father and his brothers, or possibly one of my older cousins, dug. I even dug some myself, more like ditches covered with boards and dirt to hide in.
There is a strange pleasure in getting dirty and covered in mud, without having to worry about staying clean. A good friend of mine loved to wear a white jumpsuit, which of course didn’t stay white for long in the cave. There is also something about crawling that seems nice.
Knowing a cave can be a great reward. When you can find your way, and even share with others about where and how you got to a special place.
Ask anyone who goes to the caves why they go to the caves, and they will have a hard time finding an answer. They may tell you what they do in the caves, but not why they do it. After years of visiting well-known caves, I began to search for more reasons to enter the dark holes in the ground. The mapping piqued my interest. We talked about mapping and creating computer programs to map the caves as we traveled back and forth to caves in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. I slowly developed a program to plot and draw the cave passages, first on an Apple computer that we had at work and then improved it using Visual Basic on my personal computer at home. I even sold specimens at caving events, but now I give it away on my website.
The caves were sometimes used as social gathering places. Big Dan Cave, also called Deaton’s Cave, in Georgia has a long and bleak past. A prehistoric tortoise carved out of stone was discovered in the 1950s when someone first tried to turn the cave into a recreation area. After a few dances they had a shootout and it was shut down. The cave property was sold by the Deaton family.
Ray Landrum bought the cave in 1950 for $ 500. Landrum built a dance hall at the entrance to the cave in the late 1960s. Bands played on the concrete platform and square dances were held downstairs. Landrum built a building at the entrance to the cavern out of empty beer cans. He also built a souvenir shop in the cave and a residence over the entrance. A fire burned the entrance and Mr. Landrum walked away. The spring was also enclosed by Landrum and was sold in 1970 for $ 50,000.
Without a doubt, Deaton’s cave was used as a refuge by the first Indians in the area; the concrete dance floor must cover many treasures from the past. The cave’s location on the Euharlee River, (Indian name for “she laughs while running”) provided water and fish. Deaton’s Cave is now also known as Euharlee Creek Cave. Deaton’s cave was one of my first mapping projects when I was learning how to create cave maps.