By Bill Wolcott<br><a href="mailto:bill.wolcott@lockportjournal.com">E-mail Bill</a>
The legends of the Lockport Caves linger lightly on Cave Street. Residents have heard about cave openings in their neighbors’ basements.
There are tales of caverns that stretch west for more than a mile beyond Transit Street and of adventurous boys who went deep in the caves in the 1920s and were killed by poisonous gases.
The caves were reportedly used as hideouts for criminals and as a hiding place for slaves along the Underground Railroad. The urban legends were never confirmed but piqued the imagination. However, historical research can confirm none of these stories.
Does the dolomite rock, which is responsible for Niagara Falls, provide underground paths to rooms of glistening stalactites and stalagmites? Are there underground streams?
Men with means and boys with dreams wanted to know.
‘Eighth Wonder of World’
The Lockport Cave Co. of 1883 and the reincorporated Lockport Cave Co. of 1969 sought treasure under city streets. The companies were not in pursuit of jewels or gold. The entrepreneurs saw potential commercial aspects to open the “Eighth Wonder of the World” to tourists.
“We had real thoughts we were going to make a bundle of money,” said Tom Callahan, who was a 15-year-old DeSales High School student when he began his venture. “The stories and rumors are all over the place.”
John McIntosh Jr., then a 30-year-old surveyor, was enthralled by stories of County Historian Clarence Lewis. “It would be something we could develop on a commercial basis,” he said.
McIntosh joined forces with Callahan’s clan to form the Exploratory Council Advisory to the Lockport Cave Co. Inc. “We were working as two different groups and decided to look at everything collectively, rather than look at it from a rival point of view,” said McIntosh, Delhi College alum. “There was an element of competition between ourselves and Tom. We reached a point of, ‘Why bump heads? We might as well cooperate with one another.’ ”
“The fact that historian Clarence Lewis wrote about it extensively gives a lot of credence to the topic,” said Doug Farley, director of the Lockport Discovery Center. “The earliest writings about the cave were in 1821, when early residents more or less fell in it and named the area Cave Street.”
The caves were extensively explored in the 1800s, and the residents of Cave Street have heard bits of legends and facts. Neighbors heard about openings in the home three houses down and an entrance to a cave in the house across the street.
Cave Street
• Jason Gough moved to 43 Cave St. about 15 years ago and began research 10 years ago. He found sketches of five major caves down to Main Street. Gough read a newspaper report about adventurous kids who were killed by unknown gases deep in the cave in the 1920s.
He noted aerial photos that show Cave Street and Carlton Place are not entirely parallel, and there’s a diversion chamber in the property between the streets.
• Thelma Demmin has lived on Cave Street for about 50 years. “They say we’re built on a cave, but I don’t know anything about it,” she said.
• Roxanne Smith, who has lived on Cave Street for 32 years, heard there used to be a cave entrance in the empty house across the street.
• Nancy Fry has lived on Cave Street for seven years and has heard different people talk about it. It was a dump. It was an underground river.
• Randi Snyder moved from Pennsylvania and heard from a Realtor that a lot of houses had cave entrances. That’s why its named Cave Street.
Exaggerated reports
There were stories of the cave stretching east to Medina and west to Tonawanda in the 1800s. Merchants imagined a shipping line down Eighteenmile Creek that would connect Lockport to Lake Ontario. Personal accounts were recorded by spelunkers who traversed the cave for long distances. A big gully ran through the middle of town leading to the unknown, some said.
In 1859, the Lockport Chronicle reported men entering the cave at the corner of Cave and Main streets. The spelunkers gave details of their supposed adventures.
Lockport Cave Co.
The first Lockport Cave Co. raised $100,000 by selling capital stock at $100 per share in 1883. On Feb. 14, it was reported that excavators were clearing stone and mortar from the mouth of the cave. “They were very cautious about who they would let around what they were doing,” said Callahan.
When the wooden bridge that covered the ravine over East Avenue was torn down, the creek backed up, causing flooding. On April 18, 1886, the cave entrance was sealed.
Civil defense shelter
The cave was the scene of adventure for the youth of Lockport, but where did it go? The cave apparently was real enough to be considered as a civil defense shelter in the Cold War days of the 1950s.
The Buffalo Museum of Science requested to explore “the immense catacombs that honeycomb the city.”
Enter Callahan, the teenager with big ideas, and McIntosh, the surveyor.
“I’m a young kid,” Callahan said. “There was nothing else to do and I was drawn to the allure of this. I heard rumors all my life that there was this big cavern underground in the city. It was huge and they were going to use it as a major tourist attraction.”
The Callahan and McIntosh groups formed the Advisory and Exploratory Council to the Lockport Cave Co. Inc. They petitioned the Lockport Common Council in July 1969 “to actively support and encourage the reopening of the Lockport Cave as a worthy and important project.”
Professors and speleologists from the University at Buffalo pitched in and seismographic testing was done. It was thought the cave ran east and west from Cave Street. John Strickland drilled to intersect the passages the near the site of the current post office on East Avenue. They hoped to detect whether there was a void or not. Milton F. Honeck Jr. of the Underground Development Co. of Buffalo supported the endeavor.
“We took a lot of tests and basically we found there wasn’t any difference,” McIntosh said.
Dangerous and cold
“This was too dangerous and took too long,” McIntosh said. “It too much time to walk down there. Plus, you had to be careful what the weather was. If it was raining in the Eighteenmile Creek drainage way, the water would rise in this thing and you might find yourself not able to get out.”
The city gave permission to go though manholes on Carlton Place in order to cut the trek from the golf course to the cave opening. The recreational spelunkers wore wet suits to keep warm and had to crawl under a bolder to get into the cave.
“Sometimes you were crawling in the water on your stomach and it was not big enough to stand,” McIntosh said. “There was large rock at the end of this thing and you have to go, with a wet suit, under that rock into the water and come up on the other side.”
Not what was expected
“We discovered three rooms that led into the cave,” Callahan said. “We firmly believe the three rooms that we found was what they were talking about in 1800s ... Knowing what we know and knowing they suddenly went bankrupt, it’s hard for me to believe this wasn’t a scam to bilk the people out of their money.”
The three “cave rooms” were small. According to Callahan, the first was 6 square feet, the second was about 15 square feet and the third was round with a 12-foot diameter.
The stories of a century years ago did not hold up.
“It (the cave people had talked about) had all these open and cathedral ceilings, stalactites and everything else,” McIntosh said. “Unfortunately, based on our investigation, (the stories) did not prove to be correct.”
Callahan said, “I don’t believe there was anything substantially larger than what we found. I firmly believe that the Cave Co. of the 1880s was a scam. There wasn’t anything big enough to be a tourist attraction. If there was, I would have opened it.”
McIntosh concurred with the scam theory.
Meanwhile, Callahan had already turned his attention to the hydraulic tunnel, which had provided water power to Lockport Industries along the canal.
‘Cave mile’
The 20th century entrepreneurs came away feeling there was no natural cavern of any size. They found no indication that a cave went west towards Transit Road.
Earlier explorers may have experienced what McIntosh called a “cave mile.”
“You are in absolute, total darkness, you’re in a cold temperature. If you’re claustrophobic, you don’t want to be in there. You might go 20 feet and think you’ve gone a mile. You’re in total isolation from the outside world,” he said.
“The rock was solid and hard,” Callahan said. “We found what we found, but it wasn’t big enough for a commercial enterprise. Based on seismic information, we never found anything the people in the 1880s indicated was there.”
Undeterred, Callahan opened The Lockport Cave & Underground Boat Ride. The attraction offers a 70-minute guided tour through the tunnel. Visitors can walk through a 1,600-foot tunnel blasted out of solid rock and take an underground boat ride.
There are stalactites, flow stone, various geological formations and artifacts left behind by the men who built the tunnel in the early days of the Erie Canal.
It’s billed as America’s longest underground boat ride.
Contact reporter Bill Wolcott
at 439-9222, ext. 6246.
