Real photo postcard. Entrance to Meramec Cave in Stanton, Missouri. Probably 1930s
Caves have been inhabited and served as the stage for mythological tales in most cultures, past and present. Indigenous peoples used Missouri’s numerous caves for shelter long before Europeans arrived. For a century and a half after that, it was mined for saltpeter (potassium nitrate, which is used in the manufacture of fireworks, fluxes, gunpowder, etc.), and was even named “Saltpeter Cave.” By the time this photo was taken Meramec Cave had a well-known history.
After the Civil War, local residents found more genial uses for the cavernous space like celebrations, music events, and “cave parties.” In 1933, Lester Dill bought the cave and turned his marketing talents to its promotion. His billboards still dot our highways. But more significant to the evolution of tourism, Les is credited with the invention of the bumper sticker. While visitors toured the cave, Dill sent “bumper sign boys” into the parking lot to tie (no stick-‘em or glue those days) Meramec Caverns bumper signs on their cars. He got free advertising; visitors had another souvenir.
The Corps of Engineers had ambitious plans for the Meramec River and its surrounding landscape:
“A fifty-one-page booklet published in 1966 by the University of Missouri Extension Division summarized the master plan the Corps and other state and federal groups had to take over the entire Meramec basin.
In 1949, they undertook an ambitious planning process to build three reservoirs in the Meramec basin. They invited fourteen other state and federal agencies to participate in a grandiose improvement scheme. By 1965, they proposed thirty-one reservoirs, small, medium, and large, that would transform the region into a land of lakes and a motorboat paradise.”
Lawsuits were filed. The public was alerted:
“Don Rembach and Roger Pryor and other cavers and geologists brought out the fact the dam was not only built on a fault, it was in such a karst area it might not hold water. Mr. St. Louis Zoo and national TV star, Marlon Perkins, made a short film of floating the beautiful Meramec that was shown in movie theaters in St. Louis. Folk singer Tom Shipley wrote a protest song:
Well the generals laugh and the generals gloat /
but the people of Missouri, well they never got a vote /
they’re putting up a dam and we’re putting up a fight /
on the banks of the Meramec.”
Quoted from Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir.
The original postcard is now in the Payton Ozarks Collection of the Ozarks Studies Institute at Missouri State University.