Category: Archeaology

Bangor Cave Casino

12/17/2018

Bangor Cave, ca. 1930 (Courtesy Blount County Memorial Museum)

To find Bangor Cave today, you must know where to look in the deep piney woods of Central Alabama. That was not always the case. For a short but exciting time in the late 1930s, Bangor Cave was one of America's most exotic nightspots. A special spur to the cave, built by the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, brought thousands of elegantly dressed southerners to the cave's bungalow entrance. There, they waited outside for the chance to enter an underground Shangri-La. And a lucky few, usually with bulging wallets, were allowed into the private casino hidden behind a heavily bolted door.

The Moundville Duck Bowl

9/20/2017

(Courtesy Moundville Archaeological Park)

The Moundville Duck Bowl-arguably the most beautiful piece of prehistoric Native American art ever discovered in the United States—has come home. Sculpted out of a single massive piece of stone, its creator adorned the rim of the elegant bowl with the graceful neck and head of what appears to be a supernatural bird creature. Called by its excavator, Clarence Bloomfield Moore, “a triumph of aboriginal endeavor, the ‘Portland vase’ of prehistoric art in the United States,” it remains unique in its execution and form. Some of the nation’s great museums have displayed the Duck Bowl or “Bird-Serpent Effigy Bowl,” as it has been called recently. Until now this important artifact has not been in Alabama since Moore found it at Moundville 105 years ago.

Bangor Cave Casino

The Moundville Duck Bowl

From the Vault

Archives

Categories