On April 9, 1885, The New York Times published an article entitled “Buried Town, Missouri: A strange discovery in a coal mine near Moberly” presents a story that is as mysterious as it is fascinating.
Moberly, then the largest town in Randolph County with a population of 6,108 in the 1880s, provides the setting for this extraordinary account.
The story harkens back to a time when journalism valued sales over accuracy, and the truth was often sacrificed in the name of commercial success. But the story involves an underground city and giants in the Midwest, so it's worth telling again.
By sinking a shaft to a depth of 360 feet, the miners broke into the cave, revealing a “wonderful buried city,” the article said. Lava arches extended across the roof of the cave and towered over the streets of the ancient city, “that are recurrently spaced and surrounded by partitions of stone, cut and finished in a reasonably good, though crude, masonry style.”
Workers, along with Moberly City Recorder David Coates and Moberly City Marshal George Keating, searched the area and found a 30-by-30-foot room in the cave filled with stone benches and hand tools.
“Further searches revealed statues and paintings fabricated from a composition very just like bronze, with none luster,” the article says.
Explorers discovered a stone fountain in the wide courtyard from which “perfectly pure water” was still poured. However, what was next to the fountain interested people visiting this place.
“Fragments of a human skeleton lay next to the foundation (of the fountain),” we read in the article. “The leg bones were measured, the femur 4 and a half feet, the tibia 4 feet three inches, which showed that in life the figure was 3 times the scale of an strange man and possessed of wonderful muscular strength and speed.”
As the story goes, his skull was smashed; Bronze tools, granite hammers, metal saws and flint knives were scattered in all places. “They are not as refined or as carefully crafted as those now made by our best mechanics, but they show skills and evidence of advanced civilization that are very wonderful,” the article says.
The discoverers spent 12 hours within the buried city and emerged only when the oil of their lamps ran out.
“This is not the end of the wonders of discovery,” the article wrote. “A further extended search will be conducted in the next day or two.”
No records found for prolonged search.
Dr. Tom Spencer, a professor within the department of history, humanities, philosophy and political science at Northwest Missouri State University, said it was because newspapers tried to ignore it after they printed the article.
“It seems to me that these stories were written purely on hearsay with little or no first-hand reporting on the ground,” he said. “As the story progressed, the details became more and more outrageous.”
He compares it to a children's game where children sit in a circle and one child whispers a story into the opposite's ear, and when the story comes full circle it is totally different.
“The purpose of this exercise was to try to see what happens when history comes full circle,” he said. “If you remember, sometimes the “finished story” bore little resemblance to the unique story. I suppose one element of the story is predicated on fact – an odd shaft formation or long femur was discovered, for instance – and because it circulated in journalistic circles, it became increasingly embellished.
So what happened to the fabulously buried city beneath Moberly, Missouri?
“At that time, stories like this would come out periodically and usually disappear quietly because someone would go investigate and there was nothing out of the ordinary,” Spencer said. “To avoid embarrassment, newspapers simply don't write anything more about it.”
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