Having grown up in the Springfield area, I've known about Crystal Cave, located seven or eight miles north of Springfield, for most of my life. For many years, it was a pretty successful show cave, but it closed to tours twelve years ago or so, and, as far as I know, has still not re-opened. In fact, it was recently up for sale, but I don't know whether it still is.
As a longtime resident of Joplin, I am also fairly familiar with the old Crystal Cave that was located on West 4th Street in Joplin. It, too, was a tour cave during the early 1900s, but it closed in the early 1930s because of slackening attendance, high humidity inside the cave, and other problems. About that time or shortly afterward, mining in the Joplin area began tapering off and the cave began to fill with water, since the surrounding shafts were not being pumped out as they had been. An attempt was made in the 1940s to de-water the cave so that it might be opened back up, but the effort was unsuccessful and the cave was sealed back up. Today, a historical marker stands at the northwest corner of Fourth and Gray in Joplin as the only visible reminder of the cave's location.
However, I was not familiar with Crystal Caverns at Cassville until just a day or two ago. I think I might have vaguely been aware that such a place existed, but that was about all I knew until I started doing some research for this blog.
Crystal Caverns, located less than a mile north of Cassville just off Business Highway 37, was discovered in the mid-1800s, but it remained a private cave for almost eighty years. The website of the Barry County Museum says the cave was first opened as a show cave in 1924, but the Missouri Cave and Karst Conservancy says that 1994 marked Crystal Caverns's 65th and final year as a show cave. The latter statement seems to jibe with my own research, because, as best I've been able to determine, the cave was first opened for tours on July 19, 1930. A notice in the July 17, 1930, issue of the Cassville Republican announced that the cave would open on the 19th. Follow-up articles in the same paper make it clear that the cave did indeed open on or very near the 19th, and they also make it pretty clear that this was not a re-opening for the season but rather a first-time opening.
In the summer of 1930, the cave was being developed by Philip Eidson and John McFarlin. (McFarlin was married to Eidson's sister, and her and Eidson's father had previously owned the property.) It's clear from issues of the Republican in the summer of 1930 that the cave enterprise was a new or recent undertaking. For instance, the owners were still in the process of naming the formations in the cave. In addition, an article published in the Republican in early July of 1931 mentions that the cave "was first opened" less than a year ago. So, if the cave opened in 1924, as the county museum says, it must have been on a very limited basis and must not have been very well promoted.
When the cave opened in 1930, guided tours costs fifty cents, and they were conducted by flashlight and Coleman lanterns. The tour took visitors to six different rooms. At this early stage, the cave was sometimes called Crystal Cave. The fact that there were two other caves in the region by the same name may have been partly why the Cassville cave soon came to be called Crystal Caverns instead of Crystal Cave.
In the spring of 1931, McFarlin and his family went to Kentucky to tour several show caves in that state to get a better idea how to operate their own cave back in Cassville.
The McFarlin family or relatives of the family continued to operate Crystal Caverns, with a brief interruption, until Gary and Linda Sartin leased the property in 1977. The Sartins kept the cave open until 1994. It then sat vacant for about five years until the Missouri Cave and Karst Conservancy took it over. The group spent the next ten years or so surveying, mapping, and restoring the cave. The cave is now primarily an educational resource and is open by appointment only. In 2015, someone broke into the cave and vandalized it, destroying many rock formations.
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