DeSoto Caverns
Named for the famous Spanish explore who traveled through this area in 1540. Over its rich history it offered shelter for native Indians for centuries (a 2,000-year-old Woodland Period burial was excavated by archeologists in the mid-1960s), became the first officially recorded cave in the U.S. (1796), and served as a Confederate gunpowder mining site during the Civil War.
One of the largest show caves in the southeastern U.S., the main room of the caverns stands 12-stories high and is as large as a football field. The caverns' onyx-marble stalagmites and stalactites are among the most concentrated accumulations to be found in American.
Marker can be reached from DeSoto Caverns Pkwy (State Highway 76).
Courtesy hmdb.org
