NEW YORK FOLKLORE QUARTERLY
Vol. III, No. 2, Summer, 1947

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CAVE LORE OF THE TACONICS
Clay Perry

A MAN went into a hole in the side of a hill to find his dog and discovered one of the largest caves in the Taconic went into a hole in the side of a hill to find his dog Range. The dog had gone into this hole to follow some wild animal it was tracking. After a drop of about twenty feet into a perpendicular shaft in stone, bouncing down slippery rocks, the dog was unable to find its way up and out. Several days passed before the dog’s owner, a farmer living in the neighborhood, became worried about his hound’s absence. He told some young men about the dog’s vanishing, and they went to examine the opening in the limestone rocks.

They shinnied down into the shaft, found solid flooring of gravel and rock in a shallow stream, and a vast, arched chamber opening from a tent-shaped passage, a huge half-round pillar rising at one side, as if supporting the roof sixty to seventy feet above.

Advancing down the gentle slope of the main passage, as the cave explorers got near the end they heard some strange sounds, “saw what they believed to be some barrels” at the far end of the chamber, became frightened, and scrambled out without further exploration. Later, three bolder fellows, John Holley, Moses Dolph, and John Culver, entered the cave, which the other explorers had said they believed to be “a den of thieves,” and discovered the remains of a dog near a spring deep down at the far end of the main passage where it squeezed out to an impasse. ...

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