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OPENED AND CLOSED: HEARN ESTATE PIT, TENNESSEE

Marion O. Smith

On March 29, 1999, workers intersected a pit while digging the foundation for a new
house near the "Blackberry Hill" development next to Center Hill Lake in DeKalb County,
Tennessee. One of the house contractors was Henry Williams of Ringgold, Georgia, who shined
a light down the hole and took a few snapshots with a disposable camera. He estimated the
depth at about 100 feet. Williams was raised on Sand Mountain, Alabama, and during his youth
had explored a few caves. By the night of the 30th I became involved. Williams called Clark
Byers of Sequoyah Caverns. Byers called Ken Pennington of Dade County, Georgia, the
founder of the 1960s Rockeater Grotto. Pennington called me, and I called Williams who, on
the 31st, set me up with the owners to investigate the pit.

During the early afternoon of April 3 I met Williams, his Chattanooga partner, and five
of the seven-member Hearn Estate, the owners, including Billy Ray Hearn and Rick and Vicki
Horne, all of Davidson and Williamson Counties, Tennessee.

After I signed a lengthy waiver, I tied

seventy-six and 123 foot ropes together, rigged to
a tree sixty-five or seventy feet away, and began
my descent. The opening was about four feet in
diameter and some eight feet down the shaft was
offset. At a depth of thirty or thirty-two feet
there was a muddy floor at a divide. To the
northeast there was a twelve to fifteen foot pit,
ten feet long, with flowstone at the north end.
To the southwest the far wall was under ten feet
away, and below there was a small opening to a
deeper pit. This hole was muddy and dangerous
and I spent a while clearing rocks, ultimately
enlarging the dimensions to two by two and a
half feet. Eventually, I continued my descent,
using a bulge in the wall to keep the rope from
other unstable rocks at the north end of the hole.
Fifteen or twenty feet lower was another offset,
but devoid of loose rocks. At minus forty-five
feet there was a horizontal joint two or three feet
wide which went forty feet southwest and ended.
I was unable to actually traverse it. |

At minus fifty-eight feet I crossed the
knot, and below me was seventy-two to seventy- ~
four feet of rope. The pit became much larger,
up to ten by eighteen feet and freefall. I rap-
pelled amid a heavy drip to the end of the rope,
some ten feet above deep wall-to-wall water. There was nothing dry at the bottom, which had

to be lake level. At I think the southwest end I saw a fifteen to twenty foot long crack, also
flooded. The depth of the pit, to the surface of the water, is about 140 feet, making it perhaps
the deepest in DeKalb County. The length is about sixty feet. Altogether, I spent an hour or
more in this pit, and on the way out I checked the parallel twelve-fifteen foot pit at minus thirty
feet. All the way down I snapped more pictures for Mr. Williams.

The new house will now be built sixty feet more to the southwest. On April 17, 1999,
the pit was covered with several large rocks and the area above it was restored to almost the
original contour. There is now eight feet of earth above Hearn Estate Pit. I may be the only
person ever to do it. Eat your heart out, Monk McClanathan!