When a family has lived around the same area as mine for two hundred years, you get old articles like this one:
The Mill Hole
The 'Mill Hole', located below Park City (the town in which I grew up.) west of the 31-W, referred to as the "maelstrom". Below is an article written by a man who visited Mammoth Cave.
The stream of water that operated the water wheel, flows from a cave on the northwest side of the sink. It is interesting to note that people in that day, knew that the water of the "Mill Hole" emptied into Green River....and this was before dye testing became common.
Here is the article followed by a picture of the Mill Hole. The Higginbotham brothers are my uncles.
"In company with the Higginbotham brothers, to whom I am indebted for many courtesies, during my stay here, I visited the maelstrom where a beautiful stream of sparkling water gushes from the foot of a cliff which has a perpendicular elevation of fifty feet. The little stream, twenty yards from its birthplace, is made to turn a great overshot water wheel, thirty feet in diameter, a little below which it forms a beautiful cataract making a sheer leap of forty feet to the rocks below where it murmurs a soft farewell and sinks into the earth again like the babe that breathes one mortal breath and returns to its element of clay. Into this rock walled valley we cautiously climbed for a slip of the boot meant a crash to the pitiless rocks at the awful depth below.
The principal depth of this valley is about one hundred feet in length, the width at the bottom is naught, and on either side and at either end rises a bold precipitous cliff to the height of a hundred and fifty feet. At the southern end rises perpendicularly to a great height a crescent cliff so smooth that one is led to wonder if a mason's trowel had molded the surface. Standing at the bottom of this cliff bound valley one sees but a small patch of sky, but a wealth of walls of stone polished by the floods of ages are a feast for the eyes of him who admires the walls of stone that nature left unbroken when it was done building worlds. The waters that flow into this valley find their way underground to Green River five miles away. This is attested by the fact that a toll dish lost from the overshot mill referred to was found in Green River next day and also by the fact that a rise in the river results in the accumulation of water here, and a few years ago, when Green River was exceptionally high, this sink, as they call it here, overflowed its rocky rim and the tall spire-like sycamores that grew in the bottom of it were totally submerged.
A great multitude of visitors come constantly to visit the Mammoth Cave and go away leaving unseen a wealth of scenery tenfold more interesting than the world famed cavern."
"J.H. Thomas"
