Original oil painting by: Grandfather’s wife
Grandfather says there is a natural cave on his property: Argobrite’s Cave, named after an itinerant physician who made calls on horseback to local subsistence farmsteads in the early nineteenth century. Local legend has it that he discovered the cave while seeking a shortcut between some farms.
There is a never-failing stream flowing from its mouth, which cascades down to a valley bottom, six hundred feet or so below.
When he bought the place, Grandfather visualized piping some of the water down the slope to a generator. The flow rate and pressure head could provide 200 amp household electric service, but its safe conversion and transmission to the house a half-mile away made it uneconomic. Solar was also uneconomic, but Grandfather did set his house roof facing south with the pitch equal to the latitude, anticipating solar’s eventual economic viability.
Well, why is this important to him, if he never developed it?
Because ownership of the means to live independently has always mattered most to him, whether or not he took full advantage of it.
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About the Author: RD Blakeslee is an octogenarian from West Virginia who built his net worth by only investing in that which can be enjoyed during acquisition and throughout life, as opposed to papers in a drawer, like stocks and bonds. You can read more about him here.
Photos: Courtesy of the Blakeslee Family
Woah, am I jealous! Our woods hide a lot of good stuff, but a cave is not among them.
Our last place had a stream running along the northern boundary, but the floe wasn’t strong enough to do anything with except water the deer.
Our land overlies limestone karst, so we have quite a few underground streams,, here and there.
One gives rise to a spring, which has its water piped to a cattle drinking trough, another keeps a pond full of water.
Air flowing with the stream out of the cave is at a constant 52 degrees F.
While I was building our house, I used to sleep on a chaise lounge downstream of the cave entrance on hot days and work early in the morning and late evening.
Ambient temperature was regulated by moving the lounge nearer or farther from the cave.
Frank Loyd Wright’s architecture “Fallingwater” took advantage of this phenomenon.
Oh, to be a kid again and have that cave on my property!
Grandfather: Oh, to be a kid again – no additional requirements (-:
Judging by the people in the photo, that cave looks fairly tall. Did you ever get adventurous and take a spot light and try to paddle a small raft or boat into the cave? Or does the water level reach the top of the cave pretty quickly?
There are two passages in the cave. Near the mouth, there’s a wide side chamber with a high ceiling, but it’s only a few yards long.
A second passage is long, narrow and low; the stream flows from it.
It’s not navigable.
It’s a wet crawl to get back there; spelunkers have mapped about a mile of it but never got to the end.
That kind of crawl can be dangerous. The water level rises quickly during rainstorms