Existing comment:
Community Cornerstone:
For 200 years, Flint Ridge bustled with community life. Its residents taught school, operated show caves and farmed the rugged hillsides to provide for their families. And the cornerstone of this community was the church.
Faithful members often walked or rode horseback through wind, rain and mud to attend worship, homecomings and revivals. It provided a refuge for neighbors to rest from their labor, a joyous gathering place for weddings, a sanctuary for funeral mourners.
With the development of Mammoth Cave National Park, hundreds of families sold -- willingly or unwillingly -- the only home they had ever known. Homesites were dismantled and reclaimed by forests, erasing fields that once ensured the survival of generations. Though communities moved away, some family members stayed behind, at rest in the church's cemetery and in hundreds of graves shrouded in these woods.
The Mammoth Cave Baptist Church is one of the few pre-park structures still standing in the park. Its presence recalls the congregations it once nurtured, the lives they lived, and the sacrifice they made so that all may enjoy this earthly piece of Heaven.
Monnie Esters: Monnie Esters not only farmed, but cut cross-ties in the winter and picked up jobs at Great Onyx Cave as a carpenter to support his wife and eight children.
OP and Margaret Shackelford were familiar faces on Flint Ridge. OP was clerk at this church and spent time as a teacher helping children learn to read and write.
The Collins family discovered and operated Great Crystal Cave here on Flint Ridge. Floyd Collins died in 1925 while exploring Sand Cave, not far from this site. |