Dana Cudmore Digs into the History of Howe Caverns and Cave Country

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Brett Barry: So when you were a tour guide, there was a question that came up again and again. Do you want to recount what that was?

[00:00:10] Dana Cudmore: Yeah, “Did anybody ever die down here?”

[00:00:13] Brett Barry: Why was that such a popular question? I wouldn't think to ask that. From 1971 to 1976, Dana Cudmore was a tour guide at Howe Caverns, one of the largest caves in the Northeast, where, for whatever reason, the question, "Has anybody ever died down here?" was asked again and again, and the answer Dana would come to discover was yes, two employees of Howe Caverns collapsed on April 24, 1930, at the same time that a nearby cement quarry detonated seven and a half tons of dynamite to knock 60,000 tons of limestone from the hillside. Cudmore recounts that story in his book, The Cave Electrician's Widow: The Tragedy at Howe Caverns & Dramatic Courtroom Fight for Justice. It's his fourth book about Howe Caverns and the historic cement and stone quarries of New York's cave country at the northern edge of the Catskills. On today's Kaatscast, we join Dana Cudmore for a drive-through Howes Cave, New York, a locus for tourism and industry since the mid-1800s.

[00:01:29] Campbell Brown: This episode is supported by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past as you watch the waterwheel bring a working sawmill to life! Bring a picnic to enjoy by the millpond. For more information about scheduling a tour or about their 2025 events, visit hanfordmills.org. Kaatscast is sponsored by The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like The Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and The Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

[00:02:04] Brett Barry: Today's story begins in Cobleskill, New York, where we met up with author and historian Dana Cudmore for a drive-through cave country at the northern edge of the Catskills.

[00:02:17] Dana Cudmore: I am Dana Cudmore, and we are just leaving my home in the village of Cobleskill. We're taking a tour of Schoharie County's limestone cave belt. Schoharie County is the northeasternmost point of a cave belt that runs through the United States. It basically starts just a little farther north from where we are and works its way down through Pennsylvania into the Virginias and then kind of heads west through Kentucky.

[00:03:02] Brett Barry: So in this area you have Howe Caverns?

[00:03:06] Dana Cudmore: Yep.

[00:03:06] Brett Barry: You have "Howe's Cave" with an apostrophe?

[00:03:09] Dana Cudmore: Yep.

[00:03:09] Brett Barry: And you have "Howes Cave" without an apostrophe?

[00:03:12] Dana Cudmore: Yes.

[00:03:12] Brett Barry: So I've got an Abbott and Costello question for you: "Who's Howe?"

[00:03:18] Dana Cudmore: Howe is Lester Howe, and he is the man who [if not discovered] was the first to fully explore a cave that was known about but not really, pardon the pun, dug into. He discovered it on May 22, 1842, on his neighbor's property, and he bought the property from him the following year. What's different about the fact that he explored this cave was that he decided to open it as an attraction, and Howe's Cave [that's Howe's] was the third cave in the country that was open to the public, and he ran it as a family business for a number of years, charging anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar for people to take the tour by torchlight, and it was an adventure. It was an all-day adventure, people being in the cave for 8 to 10 hours to 12 hours. The Howes Cave is what the State Department of Transportation calls the community that's sprung up around Lester Howes Cave, and that's without the apostrophe. It's like Glens Falls. I'm sure Glen was someone who had an apostrophe after his name at one point.

[00:04:51] Brett Barry: Can you recount the story of how Howe discovered the cave?

[00:04:57] Dana Cudmore: Sure, the story is the one that's told that... Howe Caverns every day is that he noticed that his cows were moving to a particular spot in the field on hot days, and when he moved up to investigate, he could feel the cool air from the cave coming up from below ground, and the entrance to the cave had been covered by the overgrowth of brush and shrub, and it was not plainly visible. When he dug a little deeper and appeared inside, he, as I said, found the cave on his neighbor's property and was the first to fully explore the cave.

[00:05:47] Brett Barry: And you are quite familiar with this history, and one reason is that you had a job in the 1970s?

[00:05:54] Dana Cudmore: I was a tour guide at Howe Caverns, like hundreds of other young men and women from this area have been, and I worked there for a couple of years in high school as soon as I turned 16 and completed four years of college. It was a great place to work, mostly younger staff, not unlike a fraternity in some respects.

[00:06:20] Brett Barry: So we just passed a sign for Secret Caverns.

[00:06:23] Dana Cudmore: Okay.

[00:06:23] Brett Barry: What's the story there? It seems a little bit more—what's the word—not homegrown or a little fun? The branding's a little funkier?

[00:06:32] Dana Cudmore: Yeah, they're kitschy.

[00:06:33] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:06:33] Dana Cudmore: Yeah, they're always kind of a friendly frat boy type of relationship between Howe Caverns and Secret Caverns. Someone wrote that Howe Caverns was the snooty fraternity in Animal House, and Secret Caverns was, you know, the rowdy Deltas there. I can't think of the names of the fraternities, but that's how he compared the two caves.

[00:07:02] [Animal House Clip]: Kroger, your Delta Tau Chi name is Pinto. Why Pinto? Why not? What's my Delta Tau Chi name?

[00:07:11] Dana Cudmore: Well, Howes Cave became Howe Caverns in 1929 when a corporation opened it, pretty much the way you see it today. Work to do that started in '27, and they raised about half a million dollars to do the necessary work, to install electric lights, to install brick pathways, and to basically clean up the cave and make it accessible to people who are seeing it today. One of the chief engineers [his name was Roger Mallery], and he distinguished himself in a couple of ways, but he fell in love with the daughter of the woman who ran the boarding house where he was staying, and he and her were married in the cave in 1928. That was the first of the weddings that they count today. For whatever reason, he stopped working for Howe Caverns, Inc., after about six months and went up the road and said, "I'm gonna open my own cave, and that is Secret Caverns," and the name "secret" comes from another cave that Lester Howe is said to have discovered and told everyone that it was bigger and better than his first cave, and so Mr. Mallery decided that Secret Caverns was that cave and Lester had kept the location of the Cave Secrets, hence the name Secret Caverns and Howes Cave, and I get a kick out of this: this is the real Abbott and Costello line. Secret Caverns technically has a post address that is in Howes Cave, so how do you get to Secret Caverns? Well, you go to Howes Cave and try explaining that to someone from out of the area. Well, no, I've already been to Howes Cave.

[00:09:08] Brett Barry: We pulled off on the side of the road for a view of the Howe Caverns entrance off in the distance, and Dana Cudmore explained the underground geology that gives cave country its signature features. You said you're not a geologist, but can you give a layman's overview of how caverns like these form in a limestone bed?

[00:09:29] Dana Cudmore: It's all water erosion.

[00:09:31] Brett Barry: Uh-huh.

[00:09:32] Dana Cudmore: Water seeps underground, and it typically will pocket, and the pockets grow as more water comes below ground and eats away at the limestone. Eventually an underground stream will come through and connect all of these different pockets, and that's why when you're in a cave and you look up and it's something that just seems to go straight up, they're called domes, and they're just these circular pockets that go straight up, and you think, how could water erosion work against gravity? Well, it didn't. It formed there, and the stream came through eventually and connected all these little, little pockets of water.

[00:10:17] Brett Barry: And just dug it deeper and deeper?

[00:10:19] Dana Cudmore: Yeah.

[00:10:19] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:10:19] Dana Cudmore: Yeah, and the limestone is, there's a couple of different formations. Notably, the caves here are formed in what is called the Manlius Formation, and that's named for Manlius, New York, and that is kind of the standard of how limestone formations are named—by the pockets where they're most prevalent and discovered.

[00:10:42] Brett Barry: Getting back to the story behind Cudmore's most recent book, I asked, "So when you were a tour guide, there was a question that came up again and again. Do you want to recount what that was?"

[00:10:53] Dana Cudmore: Yeah, did anybody ever die down here?

[00:10:56] Brett Barry: Why was that such a popular question? I wouldn't think to ask that.

[00:11:00] Dana Cudmore: I think it was mostly young kids who asked, and they were trying to be funny, or, you know, if someone asked it seriously, I'd give them a serious response, but if it was some young kid trying to be funny, I'd say, "Oh yeah, all the time, just a couple last week," and at the time, I honestly didn't know, but I did in fact ask the other guides, and the story that I heard was that two men were asphyxiated in the cave in 1930 following a blast at the Howes Cave Cement Works.

[00:11:39] Brett Barry: For as long as Howes Cave has drawn tourists, it's also drawn industry quarrying limestone for products like cement. Today, Cobleskill Stone Products leases about 350 acres of the quarry for the production of aggregate, or crushed stone. In years past, the quarry was exploited by a variety of companies, including, in the 1960s, Penn-Dixie Cement Company and, before that, the North American Cement Company, which, on April 24, 1930, detonated that fateful blast, which we'll hear more about in a moment. Off to the side of the quarry, overgrown by weeds and seemingly forgotten by time, is a large monument, a trophy actually, that reads "Portland Cement Association Safety Trophy Awarded To North American Cement Corporation Howes Cave N.Y. Plant For A Perfect Safety Record in 1930." Wait a minute, a perfect safety trophy the same year as the deadly blast? As Cudmore explains it, this was a PR stunt and a buttress for the cement company's legal defense in the case of asphyxiation in nearby Howes Caverns.

[00:12:58] Dana Cudmore: This is a complete fraud, by the way. This was given to the North American Cement Company in 1930. It's a safety award, and that's the year that the two men were asphyxiated in the cave.

[00:13:14] Brett Barry: When speculation was swirling as to whether they were responsible for deaths?

[00:13:18] Dana Cudmore: Right, right, and a good lawyer would argue, well, the accident didn't take place on the quarry property. It took place on cave property.

[00:13:28] Brett Barry: And so this actual monument was created in 1930?

[00:13:32] Dana Cudmore: Yeah, yeah, it was the annual award of the Portland Cement Organization.

[00:13:37] Brett Barry: Adjacent to the monument, Dana squeezes us through a narrow gap in a chain-link fence. Well, what are we breaking into here, Dana?

[00:13:47] Dana Cudmore: Well, this is the original entrance to Howes Cave.

[00:13:51] Brett Barry: Oh, wow, this is where Howe discovered it?

[00:13:54] Dana Cudmore: This is where Howe discovered it. Yeah, this is the start of the Howes Cave story.

[00:14:00] Brett Barry: Wow!

[00:14:01] Dana Cudmore: The building next to us is the third hotel at the site to welcome visitors, and they used to enter the cave through the basement.

[00:14:15] Brett Barry: Near the entrance to Howes Cave, we were met by a drift of cool air.

[00:14:20] Dana Cudmore: Oh, can you feel the cool air?

[00:14:21] Brett Barry: From the same source that beckoned those cows centuries ago.

[00:14:26] Dana Cudmore: I came across an old account from 1845, and, you know, all of the people who wrote about the cave talked about how funny it was to prepare for the cave because they were given old clothes with dried mud here and there and boots, and, you know, they all looked like beggars, and this one talked about there being a bar in the cave. This first room that you enter is called the lecture room. It's maybe 8 feet by 10 feet. Good-sized room. You can walk through it, but then it opens up into maybe something 20 by 30 feet, so you are in a good-sized room, and at the end of it there was a bar where you could, you know, get ready for the tour with a good stiff drink.

[00:15:15] Brett Barry: Everything was better back then, huh?

[00:15:17] Dana Cudmore: Yeah, yeah.

[00:15:19] Brett Barry: Who owns this property?

[00:15:21] Dana Cudmore: Technically the Cave House Museum does.

[00:15:23] Brett Barry: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:23] Dana Cudmore: We've got about a quarter-mile stretch given to us by Callanan Industries, who owns the property. Cobleskill Stone is leasing the mineral rights.

[00:15:35] Brett Barry: And so you have very limited hours?

[00:15:38] Dana Cudmore: Yeah, we're only open, I think it's the second Sunday of June, July, August, and September.

[00:15:46] Brett Barry: Okay, inside the eerily quiet Cave House Museum in the building that once served as a hotel for Howes Cave tourists, Dana Cudmore posed for a picture with a life-sized wax figure of Lester Howe, and then I finally got to ask about the tragedy that struck those two men working in the caverns. Do you want to, Dana, tell me this, a synopsis of what happened on April 24, 1930?

[00:16:16] Dana Cudmore: Sure, so we've seen the connection between the cave and Howe Caverns, and we have to remember that during 1928, the quarry was still operating. Men were underground, stringing lights. They were constructing the paths for Howe Caverns, railings, and what have you. They were working underground. The quarry was still operating. The quarry was still blasting limestone from the hillside to make cement. The process of blasting is this: first they create a level, pure stone base. They do that by removing what they call the overburden, and to you and I, the overburden is the grass, the leaves, the trees, what have you, and they strip it down to just the stone, and that's pretty close to the surface here in the cave country. They cleared an area that was 150 feet long. It was 50 feet wide, and then they drilled down 90 feet. They drilled 20 holes, two rows of 10, and part of that, they hit a pocket, meaning they drilled down and they lost the drill, so they hit an empty space. They filled it up with—they called it "bagging it," and that just dropped a bag made for that process filled with cement, with clay, what have you, to keep in the explosive force of the charge, so they loaded up these 20 holes with dynamite. By the time they finished that, they had put in seven and a half tons of dynamite. That was called a typical shot. It wasn't any larger than they had been doing, and they set it all off about simultaneously, and it took down 60,000 tons of limestone. Shot at some of it was shot as far as 300-400 feet, so that was the blast that morning on April 24, 1930. Owen Wallis, who was the chief electrician for Howe Caverns, and his cousin by marriage, John Sagendorf, entered the cave on a typical day. He was there to change lights, and, well, they never, never returned. A man was sent down to find out why they were so long, and he barely made it out alive himself. He fell out of the elevator and mentioned something about poisonous fumes in the cave, and well, that started the rescue effort, and it was pandemonium up there, but they were working on them under a Bureau of Mines Proclamation that they had to keep trying for six hours, so when the men were finally brought up out of the cave, and this was between noon and one o'clock, they were probably dead at that time. They'd been asphyxiated, possibly by the fumes from the dynamite blast, but what's intriguing is you talk to people who work with dynamite. They will tell you there's nothing in the fumes that are given off that would disable a man so quickly that he couldn't get out of the cave and back to the surface, so it was kind of a mystery, and that set the stage for the lawsuits that followed, and, as you know, a good part of the book, The Cave Electrician's Widow, is the actual testimony from the lawsuit of Martha Wallis, who's the cave electrician's widow. They'd been married not much longer than a year and had moved from Saranac Lake to here at Howe Caverns.

[00:20:04] Brett Barry: And so they were electrifying the caves for tourists?

[00:20:07] Dana Cudmore: Correct, alright, this was the time that the caves had been electric, so Owen Wallis, the electrician, he had a pretty good job. There are 21 miles of cable in Howe Caverns, and at the time I worked there, they said there were about 1,700 light bulbs, so it's about that, and, you know, they're under stressful conditions being in the cave of 52 degrees [constant dripping of water], so one probably had his work cut out for him.

[00:20:40] Brett Barry: Was there any resolution as to what the fumes were that actually killed them?

[00:20:44] Dana Cudmore: The cave was declared safe to reenter the following afternoon, and the district attorney's investigation began right after that, and his chemists and experts decided that it was carbon dioxide that killed the two men, and the quarry's attorney and their defense sought to prove that it wasn't carbon dioxide from the blast. It was perhaps naturally occurring carbon dioxide that somehow may have been loosened by the blast, but that was on the quarry property that the blast occurred, and they were perfectly entitled to work the quarry, and he does. The quarry's attorney does a little obfuscating and tries to confuse the jury, and, you know, without giving away the final verdict, you're going to guess right up until the time you get the jury's final decision.

[00:21:52] Brett Barry: Yeah, almost a century later, I asked if blasting still occurs and whether it poses a risk to humans in the caverns.

[00:22:04] Dana Cudmore: They blast probably every other week, I'm saying.

[00:22:08] Brett Barry: And do Howe Caverns stay open during those times?

[00:22:12] Dana Cudmore: As far as I know.

[00:22:13] Brett Barry: Yes, yeah, so they're confident that that situation wouldn't happen.

[00:22:17] Dana Cudmore: Yeah, it's a different process, a different type of dynamite. Then it's not as strong. It's not even half of what it was, and yeah, I mean, you saw the size of the hill that they knocked down. That's big, and they do that now with what they call benches. They take it down maybe 20 or 30 feet at a time, so there are steps nowhere near the cave really anymore.

[00:22:42] Brett Barry: Are those the only two people who ever died in the cave?

[00:22:44] Dana Cudmore: Yep.

[00:22:45] Brett Barry: It seems like there would be a lot more.

[00:22:46] Dana Cudmore: Millions and millions of people have been through the cave, yeah, yeah.

[00:22:50] Brett Barry: Wow!

[00:22:51] Dana Cudmore: Yep.

[00:22:52] Brett Barry: Do you think that this college job as a tour guide led you on this kind of lifelong path of curiosity?

[00:23:00] Dana Cudmore: Oh, definitely, definitely, yeah, you know, I was thinking about it just today, and I was thinking, you know, you wanted to be good. You wanted to be a good guide and, you know, give people, you know, an educational and entertaining tour, and, you know, I'd listen to some of the older guides and see what they had to say, and I didn't specifically go out and research the cave, you know, then in my teens, but, you know, I'd come across something, and it just really struck me as amazing. These old photos from 1880-1890 are of the same area I'm walking in, and, you know, caves don't change. If you see a man standing next to, for example, the pipe organ, well, you're standing next to that pipe organ, and it has not changed. You know, maybe he's got an oil lamp lantern that he's holding, but it's not different, and that just fascinated me. Yeah, a cave really has an amazing history, pretty remarkable.

[00:24:03] Brett Barry: Dana Cudmore is the author of The Remarkable Howe Caverns Story, Farming With Dynamite, Underground Empires, and The Cave Electrician's Widow, available now at purplemountainpress.com. Enter the promo code Kaatscast for 25% off and free shipping through June 30th. Plus, we are giving away one signed copy for free! Click the link in our show notes for a chance to win! Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast is a production of Silver Hollow Audio. Transcriptions by Jerome Kazlauskas are available at kaatscast.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, buy a Kaatscast tee shirt, or leave some feedback about the show. Follow us on Instagram [@kaatscast]. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.