Looking for Lockport's Labyrinth

After yesterday's posting on the Rochester Subway, there was some interest in the Lockport Cave. Not the cave that was man-made and is now a spectacular canal-side attraction, but the natural cave that greeted the first settlers of the tiny canal camp. Today, most of the traces have been erased from the map, but what was the attraction to a hole in the ground.

This article originally appeared in the Buffalo News a couple years ago. I wrote it as part of a monthly series I did with the paper for about a year. I'll caution you, this one is long. There is a lot of information out there about the cave -- most of it bunk. I've tried to wade through and give an accurate account of the mystery beneath our feet.

Under the streets and yards of the City of Lockport lies a mystery.  Twisting its way beneath our feet are caverns of an indeterminate length and size.  There are many rumors about the Lockport Cave, but how much truth is there to those stories?  Not to be confused the with man-made cave on the northern side of the Erie Canal, which is used today as a tourist attraction, or the culvert covering Eighteen Mile Creek as it crosses the eastern part of the city, the Lockport cave is a natural, limestone cavity.

The earliest mention of a cave in Lockport dates back to 1816 when John Comstock built a cabin near its mouth.  An article from the Lockport Daily Advertiser & Democrat dated October 20, 1858 mentions the exploration of a well-known cave situated near the corner of Cave and Main Streets.  The mouth of the cave opened into a “sunken bed of a small brook” (Eighteen Mile Creek) where it crossed Main Street.  The entrance had to be cleared of stones and only then could be entered by crawling like a lobster.  After a distance of about 50 feet, the floor suddenly dropped three feet and allowed for upright ingress.  However, various strata of the limestone protruded into the passageway with “their serrated edges sticking out like teeth and rendering free progress difficult.”

“A Visit to the Lockport Cave,” an article written by 15-year old Edwin Long, was published by the Lockport Courier in September 1859.  The report of his underground saga, while possibly exaggerated, was the first detailed exposition on the cavern system, and generated great interest among the city leaders.  In the story, Edwin and “Mr. H” entered the mouth of the cave near the corner of Main and Cave Streets in the western wall of the creek bed.  “We found it fine traveling for a distance of one hundred feet – if kneeling and elbowing and shinning and crawling over, under and between sharp rocks can be termed fine traveling – until we arrived at a chamber capable of holding six or eight persons, from which extends four different passages.”

The two explorers were able to continue through the largest of the passages for an additional fifty feet before turning toward the northwest.  Another passage ran off toward a brewery on Chestnut Street.  They found a second room almost as large as the first with yet another passage extending toward the northwest.  As the expedition delved deeper into the dark unknown, the two men were able to hear carriages and horses passing along the streets above them.  Long and “H” were able to find boards, pans, pails and nails scattered along the floor of the cave, presumably deposited there by flood waters from the creek or lost through holes extending to the surface into backyards.

Further exploration revealed another chamber, this time much larger than the previous two.  Through the murky candlelight they were able to discern several passages leading in various directions.  They followed again a northerly route until they came to the final chamber that they would explore.  Hanging precariously from the ceiling were large stones weighing several tons, which halted their progress.  Running low on candles and afraid of traversing their steps in utter darkness, the two decided to head back to “the paradise which awaited us on the outside of this abode of dark solitude.”  Before leaving this final chamber, the intrepid pioneers inscribed their names on a large rock.  Later, when the cave story was revitalized again, “Mr. H’s” identity was revealed as John Hatch, a reporter for the Lockport Courier.

A second published exploration took place in 1870 when Edwin Doty and his employee traversed the cave as far west as what they believed to be the corner of Main and Locust Streets.  Their story concurs with the Edwin Long account in which the first hundred feet of the cavern was little more than a fissure in the rock along the wall of the creek bed.  Shortly after that, Joshua Wilbur, Lockport’s first historian, took part in an exploration which took him nearly to Transit Street.  Most of the lateral passages off from the main were to the north, just as Long had described. 

In February 1883, the Lockport Cave Company was organized by Dr. Simeon Clark with the mission of exploring and opening the Lockport Cave as a tourist attraction.  To help pay for this endeavor, the company decided to sell stocks.   The initial capital stock was set at $25,000, but the incredible popularity of the project increased the investment to $100,000.  A stairway from the street level to the cave opening was constructed, and workers began to enlarge the opening to allow for easier access.  Later that month, it was noted in the newspaper that the superintendant of excavation had discovered the original entrance, which had been sealed with stone and mortar by Anton Ulrich several years previously.

In April of 1883, the City of Lockport tore down the bridge crossing the ravine on East Avenue and replaced it with a brick culvert.  The restricted flow offered by the new construction forced flood waters to enter the cave entrance, washing out the equipment placed by the Cave Company and filling the entrance with a mountain of mud and debris.  After having spent so much money to open the cave and now having to start all over, the company abandoned the project.  Three years later, in April 1886, the city had the cave mouth sealed after a young boy was lost in it for a short time.

Before being covered in the early part of the 20^th century, Eighteen Mile Creek flowed open through Lockport and over the Niagara Escarpment at the East Avenue, Spring, Exchange and Cave Streets area.  There, a gulf that the waters had carved into the escarpment, facilitated a need for a wooden bridge for East Avenue to cross at that point.  In the early days of the community, this chasm was used as a garbage dump by the residents.   Fill was gradually added until the creek was hidden underground and the land was then leveled to erase any vestige of the old canyon.  By 1925, the creek, from Remick Parkway to the canal just southwest of the Exchange Street Bridge, was covered by a culvert.

The cave fell from public interest until the 1950s when Clarence Lewis was appointed Niagara County Historian.  He believed the cave should be reopened for the tourism opportunities it could offer, or at the very least, explored by a team of experts to study the natural phenomenon.   In May of 1958, exploration began once again in the basement of a house on East Avenue.  Reports of previous owners of the house dumping furnace ashes into the corner of the basement led to an assumption that they were being poured into the cave situated under the house.

Mr. Lewis continued his campaign to open the cave the following year, approaching city officials with the intent of having the cave open to the public for part of the Pioneer Days celebration on July 21, 1959.  He declared, “The cave, some two miles long, has been explored several times, the last in 1883.  However, there are several large laterals that have never been explored.”  After learning that workers who were digging the basement of the Elks Club in 1929 had broken through the roof of the cave, four test borings were attempted near the building.  These attempts, however, proved to be a failure.  Despite all Lewis’s efforts, the cave was never reopened, though a craze of renewed interest hit the populace.

In 1961, Niagara County Civil Defense Director, Roger H. Winner, suggested that perhaps the honeycomb of caves beneath city streets could be utilized as a bomb shelter.  He wrote many letters to Washington declaring intent to investigate conversion of the cave into nuclear protection.  The project, he believed, would cost millions and would accommodate most of the 200,000 residents of the county.  Observations by a speleologist the previous year observed that the limestone making up the cave walls would not withstand the forces of a nuclear explosion.  Civil Defense officials countered with that no shelter would be very effective in the blast area, but that the cave would instead provide adequate protection from radioactive fallout.  Ultimately, the idea gained no traction and the cave with its hidden access points was never used.

Members of the Dussault family, while living at the southwest corner of East Avenue and Cave Street in 1963, remember being able to access the cave from the basement of their house.  “There was an old cistern in the northeast corner of the basement which we used to crawl into,” says Jon Dussault.  “The back wall of the cistern was broken out and there was the cave behind it.  We used to explore a little way into it.”

 His sister, Jan Dunham, remembered, “Well, I’d hold the flashlight while Jon explored. I hated spiders and wasn’t going in there.” 

Jon added, “I was scared of cave-ins and we could see one a short way inside, but there was definitely a void beyond it.  We were always scared of cave-ins.  In fact, while we lived there, the side yard did collapse and had to be filled in.”

In a 1965 letter to Clarence Lewis, Mrs. B. Sherwood of Appleton declares, “I know about an entrance to the cave in the vicinity of East Ave. and Cave Street.  I happen to know that this entrance has been filled in with earth or stone.

“When we were small children about 60 years ago, my brother, sister and I used to play around the entrance to the cave.  My brother took a rope one day and he started to explore the cave which at a certain point went down out of sight.  After that we were forbidden to go inside of the cave.  A house was built on the property.   A family with the name of Dobbins came to live there.  Recently, I talked with Lanford Dobbins and he told me that his father and he filled up the cave with loads of dirt.”

In 1970, Thomas Callahan, Dennis Bowler, and Richard Hammond discovered another section of the elusive Lockport Cave, following an 800 foot passageway with three rooms.  This again was very similar to what Edgar Long and John Hatch had discovered back in 1859.  They did encounter several areas where the cave was blocked and had been filled by residents who were wary of the void collapsing near their homes.

James Boles discovered yet another way into the maze of tunnels in April, 1970.  According to a Union-Sun article the following year, Boles is quoted as stating, “There are passageways going off in all directions.  In some places the passageways are dry; in others the water is several inches deep.  Some tunnels are half-filled with muck, which may be sewage for all I know.  This muck covers the bottoms of most of the tunnels and rooms, but in some places it is replaced by a substance underwater that seems to be crushed stone of gravel.  I discovered that people have been in some of the sections I traveled through, as I found pieces of old broken china in one part and a portion of a brick in another.”

In a recent interview with the Historian’s Office, Dr. Boles said that there wasn’t “a heck of a lot of room down there.”  In many places he had to crawl face-first into some tight spaces and had to back out to return.  Much of what he explored was filled with silt.  He did discover a good sized room about 30-40 feet around which had been filled with silt except for the top three feet.  He also announced that he had found a waterfall of about ten feet in height in a side passage.”

“I always felt the cave was bigger than what we had seen, but a lot of silt had really filled it up.  You’d have to be a tiny person to truly explore it.  And, of course, we were worried about flooding.  If it rained, the whole thing would just fill up with water.”

So, what can we say about the Lockport Cave today?  Without a doubt, underground Lockport is riddled with cavities and passages.  However, over the last two centuries since its first mention, the full extent of the cave has proven to be ever elusive.  Additionally, activities by man over that time period have most likely made the natural wonder impassable.  With the construction of a culvert to contain Eighteen Mile Creek in the late 19^th century, the cave system was likely doomed.  Not able to handle the volume of flood waters, excess debris and silt invaded the caverns, slowly filling them.

Residents, fearful of their property sinking into a large hole, further destroyed the cave as they dumped everything from garbage and ashes to dirt and stone into sinkholes that appeared in their yards or below their basements.  In all likelihood, most of the cave is now blocked in countless areas by this fill.  However stories still abound of children playing around and in the cave into at least the 1960s.  Were these incursions into the actual cave, or were they simply adventures into the few remaining open areas of a once grand, two-mile long underground labyrinth?