Clarksville Cave or Caves, are close to the highway, New York 43, fifteen miles west of Albany. Old historical accounts describe two caverns, but recent explorers have failed to enter the second one, which has become closed. Its size, however, appears to have been exaggerated by the historians. The accessible cavern is a large one, in length, but not in width or height save at the inner end, where the lake lies.
This cavern is a tunnel through which flows the rippling waters of Oniskethau Creek. One account runs as follows: 1
The Clarksville Cave in its lower course is nearly filled with gravel and for a long distance is inaccessible. A short section may be entered near the road, running east and west through the village, and a short distance from the old hotel. It is called the "Little Cave." A longer section, the "Big Cave," is entered near the top of the hill north of the shorter part. The cave presents usually a smooth, rounded arch in the harder beds, though in the thinner beds the floor is littered with fragments and presents much of the appearance of a Manlius cavern.2
A stream flows through it at all seasons and empties into the Onisthekau Creek south of the village. It is ponded in the larger section, some rods from the entrance and it would be necessary to build a boat in the cave to cross the water. It is quite possible that this stream enters the rock opposite the church, near Thompson's Lake, but this cannot be determined without further exploration. The cavern is in Onondaga limestone."
Further explorations have been made, several of them by experienced spelunkers, and at least one by a reporter and photographer from an Albany daily, their very first experience at spelunking, incidentally, and their account and their photos furnished a fresh series of views of this curious cavern.
This expedition was made on February 18, 1939, and we quote from the Times-Union account:
DE WITT TRIES HAND AT
EXPLORING CROSSES RIVER STYX-AT CLARKSVILLE
Party of 6, on Rubber Raft, Investigate
Underground Lake
By DE WITT SCHUYLER
A home-town boy who has really made
something of a name for himself in navigation circles is Captain Charon of the
River Styx Night Line, who operates a bang-up ferry business on the prin. cipal
stream of the lower world.
Even the legendary old salt himself,
however, might have taken a few notes on the fine art of underground ferrying
yester. day at the Clarksville Cave when an expedition headed by Roger Johnson,
Springfield, Mass., pioneer cave-hunter and explorer of New England, made a
successful crossing of the murky lake in the bowels of the earth that has
defied cave-crawlers for several years.
ENTRANCE NARROW SLIT
Entrance of the cave, on the G. A. Ward
farm in Clarksville is a narrow slit in solid rock, barely wide enough to admit
a man crawling on hands and knees. The peculiar rock formation, according to
the owner of the farm, was the result of a dynamite blast set off in the cave by
two men for some unknown reason about the turn of the century.
Thus it has been impossible to bring a boat
down into the cave to explore the underground lake some 40 feet deep and 80
feet long which forms nearly three-quarters of a mile from the opening of the
cave. A raft, crudely fashioned from logs once served as an explorer's aid, but
it has long since rotted away.
SIX IN EXPEDITION
The Johnson underground-expedition, of
which Clay Perry, Pittsfield author-sportsman; Arthur Palme, outdoor
photographer, also of Pittsfield; Mr. Johnson's two sons, Stephen and Charles;
George Burns, Times-Union photographer, and this reporter were members, made
the passage with a ten-foot collap. sible rubber boat which when blown up will
carry two men in perfect safety. Among
the other necessary gadgets taken along were strong ropes, shovels, crow-bars,
powerful flashlights, compasses, hipboots, raincoats, cameras, maps, and other
paraphernalia.
CAVERN WARM
Although
ice and snow had formed a foot deep around the entrance and the wind was
howling, it was nearly room temperature inside the cave. Drops of water oozed
from rock formations as the party crawled on hands and knees along the
labyrinth leading downward to a huge subterranean chamber. In the shifting
glare of flashlights, the members were counted before the trek was begun along
the slippery rock rising out of a running stream that sometimes reached above
the knees.
The tortuous passageway dipped -and bent
through the earth, winding along jutting rocks and crevices for more than a
halfmile when the first stop was made at the edge of the lake formed by the
rushing underground streams. With Steve Johnson at the pump, the shapeless mass
of rubber and canvas slowly billowed into a seaworthy craft, and was launched on
the black waters ahead.
CROSS UNDERGROUND LAKE
With Steve in the role of Charon, the party
was ferried one by one across the deep channel over which the jagged ceiling
hung scarcely three feet above. Then suddenly the channel emptied into a hollow
rock basin, which held the underground lake, deep. treacherous, and black as
any Styx. On the other side the expedition was set ashore amid the glistening
rocks that formed its shore.
Once the return trip had been maneuvered,
the boat was deflated and, equipment dangling from their shoulders, the
cavecrawlers made their way back to the entrance.
French's Gazeteer of New York State, published in 1860, refers to the Clarksville Caves as follows:
The entrance to the smaller cave, which is one eighth of a mile long,. is from the rear garden of a village house. This cavern is connected with a larger one by a subterranean passage one half mile long. It is decorated with fine crystals of calcspar.
Unfortunately these crystals do not appear in the negotiable portions of the caverns today.
A later exploration, made by a combined New England and New York State party, occurred in the spring of 1946, and the stream was so low at the time' that it was possible to traverse the entire half-mile tunnel without the use of a boat, but more easily with hip boots than without them, for those not thus equipped found it necessary to make several long and difficult belly-crawls along the ledges at the side of the stream, not to get wet to the knees. The temperature in this cavern was at that time 63 degrees Fahrenheit, due to the inrush of sun-warmed water, and the humidity was such that fog arose from the stream and bewildered the unfortunate wearers of spectacles, no end.
The dimensions of the cavern, as described above, are approximately true, the largest room, with its lake, being some 40 feet in diameter, plus the concealed portion which lies beneath a low roof which comes to within 2 feet or less of the surface of the lake. The roof is about 15 feet above the lake's surface at its highest point.
There is a legend about Clarksville Cave,
or at any rate about the stream which flows through it.
The legend concerns "The Ghost of the
Oniskethau," and tells of a mysterious trout fisherman who did his angling
entirely at night and never failed to fill his creel from the waters of this
creek. Local persons, out of curiosity, began to try to follow the lucky Izaak
Walton, but he would disappear, and the story grew that he vanished into the
cavern and caught his fish inside, in the dark, or by the use of a
flashlight-but no one ever caught him at it.
1. Report of Geologist John H. Cook, 1906.