In “Back to the Future Part III,” Doc Brown invents a time machine out of a locomotive. Perhaps the idea came from the Western Maryland Railway, which in the beginning of the 20th century in a respect, created a time machine that could take someone 200,000 years into the past.
In 1912, the Western Maryland Railway was in the midst of a large expansion. It had finally reached Cumberland in 1906, and soon thereafter, construction began on the Connellsville Extension from Cumberland to Connellsville, Pennsylvania. To make that connection, the track needed to go through the Allegheny Mountains.
As the workers excavated a cut along the side of Will’s Mountain, they blasted through the cut, widening it to allow trains to pass through it. At one point near Corriganville, a steam shovel uncovered a small cave on the north end of a limestone ridge.
“It was not the size or beauty of the cave that attracted attention, because the underground room was neither impressive in magnitude nor appearance,” J. William Hunt wrote in The (Cumberland) Sunday Times. “What caused workmen to comment was the extensive collection of bones and animal skeletons uncovered.”
The cave descended at a 45-degree angle, and it is believed an extinct stream may have deposited silt and clay containing the remains into the cave through its original entrance, a sinkhole on the top of the ridge.
A local naturalist named Raymond Armbruster heard about the discovery. He visited the site and examined the cave and the debris that had been removed.
Besides the abundance of bones, he found other fossils in the rocks. Unfortunately, because the workers were blasting through the cut with dynamite, some of the fossils were shattered.
Armbruster sent some of the fossils and bones to the Smithsonian Institution with a letter explaining the cave find.
“The arrival of those fossils from Cumberland caused almost as much excitement in the staid scientific circles of the Smithsonian as the atomic bomb caused in World War II,” Hunt wrote.
This was only the third known cave in North America to contain such a wealth of Pleistocene remains.
The other two caves are the Conrad Fissure in Alabama and the Port Kennedy Cave in Pennsylvania. The Cumberland Bone Cave has the greater number of mammalian species found, but the other caves have a greater number of total species found.
James W. Gidley was sent to examine the cave. Gidley spent four years excavating the cave and found the bones from 41 different genera of mammals, of which 20% were extinct.
Some of them are as old as 200,000 years. Other fossils were from birds and invertebrates. Gidley even found enough bones to reconstruct some of the animals.
He called it one of the most important natural discoveries of the 20th century.
“Skeletons from what is known as the ‘Cumberland’ Cave Bear and an extinct saber-toothed cat are on permanent exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History.
Other fauna identified here include mastodons, coyotes, pumas and even a crocodile,” according to the Historical Marker Database.
Included among the remains found in the cave were wolverine, coyote, crocodile, porcupine, muskrat, elk, mink, tapir, black bear, horse, badger, jumping mice, bats, peccaries, puma, gopher and mastodon.
Once the original exploration of the cave was completed, the Western Maryland Railway sealed the cave for safety reasons.
Not much of the cave still exists, but the Maryland Department of Natural Resources continues to excavate it, looking for new discoveries.