Enslaved Stephen Bishop: Mammoth Cave Guide Pioneer
Image by Don Snig
Stephen Bishop was a cave pioneer of his day and a famous Mammoth Cave guide. He was purchased along with Mammoth Cave by Dr. John Croghan of Louisville, Kentucky from his owner, Franklin Gorin. In turn, Gorin had bought Bishop while Bishop was in his teens. His new master, Dr. Croghan, opened a tuberculosis clinic in the cave. The highly contagious disease would claim the life of the 58 year-old doctor. Tuberculosis can lie dormant in an individual for several years before it activates again. Some years later, Bishop, known for his wit and vigor, would also become sick and die.
Some information on the tombstone is not correct when applied to Stephen Bishop. For example, the gravestone says Bishop died on the specific date of June 15, 1859 but this famous cave pioneer died obscurely on an unrecorded day, sometime between 1856 – 1857. That is to say, although the tombstone says he lived 37 years, Stephen Bishop actually lived to be just 34 or 35 years-old.
Bishop was freed from bondage by his owner seven years after the death of owner Dr. Croghan. As his health declined, he was released from slavery to be a free man responsible for paying his own health bills just months before his own death as a penniless sick man.
He had no gravestone. What was left behind were news stories of the unusual cave pioneer.
Twenty-something years after his death, a second-hand gravestone was purchased by a steel industrialist from Pennsylvania at a discount and refurbished to decorate the grave of the Kentucky cave explorer. Part of the tombstone was chiseled to the specifications of someone else, a soldier. "The stone he purchased was an old Union soldier’s headstone. The soldier’s name was sanded off and replaced with, ‘Stephen Bishop, First Guide & Explorer of the Mammoth Cave,’" states Find a Grave Memorial. That’s why there is a symbol of the U.S. flag and sword on its top. Bishop did not serve in the U.S. military. He died a few years before the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, before Kentucky slaves could join the U.S Army to fight the Confederates.
