During the summer of 1928, two cows named Lucky and Floyd wandered from a farm outside of Cobleskill, New York and fell to the bottom of a 26-meter (85-ft) hole. The unfortunate event piqued the interest of a local engineer, Roger Mallery, who was working on a nearby commercial cave.
He recruited a group of teens to descend into the darkness and explore. After crawling through water and mud, they discovered that the chamber was connected to another, and then another. At the end of the last chamber they found a subterranean waterfall. Mallery purchased the land and opened it up to the public the following year.
The Secret Caverns has been competing with the much larger Howe Caverns ever since, and were the first stop on a two-day bus tour to Niagara Falls that my sister and I had embarked on earlier in the morning.