Ohio Caverns

Ohio Caverns
Postcard view of entrance
Nearest city	West Liberty, Ohio
Coordinates	40°14′N 83°41′W / 40.233°N 83.683°W / 40.233; -83.683Coordinates: 40°14′N 83°41′W / 40.233°N 83.683°W / 40.233; -83.683

Ohio Caverns is one of Ohio's most popular tourist attractions and is open all year except Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. It is a show cave located 30 miles (48 km) from Dayton, Ohio near West Liberty, in Salem Township, Champaign County, Ohio in the United States. A popular tourist destination and member of the National Caving Association, it is the largest of all the cave systems in Ohio and contains many crystal formations. Approximately 90% of its stalactite and stalagmite formations are still active. The cavern system was originally an aquifer, holding an underground river of melted glacier water. This river eventually receded to lower levels of the ground and is now unseen.

The Ohio Caverns are located in the Bellefontaine Outlier, which is an outcropping of Devonian-age bedrock surrounded by Silurian-age carbonates. Most recently it has been proposed that in post-Devonian times there was a set of active parallel faults that down-dropped a block of Logan County, forming a graben, also called a rift valley.

Continued erosion of several glaciers would have been concentrated on areas around the graben, leaving this area without its protective layer of Bedford shale and more susceptible to erosion. The sunken graben area then became a topographical high, now the highest point in Ohio at the elevation of 1549 feet above sea level.

The tunnel system known today as the Ohio Caverns was discovered August 17, 1897 by Robert Noffsinger, a farmhand who worked on the land. A sinkhole had been forming on land owned by Abraham William Reams over a period of about 10 years. In August 1897, this sink hole measured 50 feet across by 10 feet deep. One particular night, the sinkhole was filled completely with water during a hard rain. By morning, the water was completely gone. Reams reported to the local newspaper that he lost "several hundred barrels of water." Reams had recently hired Robert Noffsinger, a young man from Virginia, to work on his farm. By Reams' orders, Noffsinger and Jordan Reams (unknown relation to William Reams) began to dig in the sinkhole. Noffsinger dug a few feet of soil until he hit the top of the ground's limestone layer. After finding a crack in the limestone, Noffsinger broke through this rock as well. Immediately feeling the caverns' 54 °F (12 °C) air, Noffsinger was even more curious. He lowered himself into the caverns and became the first living creature inside of the Ohio Caverns system. After crawling 8 feet into the caverns, Noffsinger called back out to Jordan Reams to fetch him an oil lantern. After Noffsinger received the lantern, he explored 802 feet on his first trip into the caverns.