Mapping of Mammoth Cave: How Cartography Fueled Discoveries, with Emphasis on Max Kaemper’s 1908 Map

Maps came first at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. Then came explorers who used the maps to make discoveries as they gained a more comprehensive understanding of the longest cave in the world. The saga of mapping at Mammoth Cave parallels the mapping of North America from the 1600s onward. The first map was an “Eye-Draught Map of Mammoth Cave”, penned from memory in 1811, not a survey, to acquaint merchants with the location of saltpeter dirt. In 1835 the managers of Mammoth Cave hired a surveyor, Edmond Lee, to survey and map and profile the main cave passages. Stephen Bishop, a slave guide at Mammoth Cave (1838 – 1857) drew a comprehensive map in 1842, partly based on the Lee survey. Bishop’s map is a schematic diagram showing many named passages and their relationship to each other. Max Kaemper, a German civil engineer, was hired by the cave manager to make an instrumental survey of the cave in 1908 and to draft a map showing five levels of the cave in distinctive colors. The Walker survey in 1936 served to establish an accurate baseline through the cave and tied entrances to each other. Ray Nelson drafted an unpublished map of the Walker survey, New Discovery survey, and more in 1956. Cave Research Foundation cartographers began mapping passages in the Flint Ridge Cave System in 1954 resulting in one of the first cave maps plotted on a topographic map. The Flint Ridge Folio, 1964, brought Flint Ridge mapping up to Kaemper’s graphic standard with the improvement of the superimposition of the surface topography. Since the 1972 connection between Flint Ridge and Mammoth Cave Ridge, Mammoth Cave has blossomed into a cave with a comprehensive high accuracy set of cave maps showing 365 miles of connected cave. The Kaemper map lay fallow in Park Service files for many years until it was rediscovered by James F. Quinlan in 1963. Diana Daunt retraced the original Kaemper map for publication by the Cave Research Foundation. The utility of the Kaemper map is its use by generations of explorers to find their way around in Mammoth Cave and to ultimately resurvey and remap all the features Kaemper recorded, and more