Do I know much about cars? No. Do I like talking about them? Definitely not. Cars take me to lots of places, I like admiring the colours of cars and the unique design of classic cars, but that’s about it. Why then, am I writing an article about a car museum, and why did I even agree to let someone take me to said car museum?
Because of the sinkhole.
Kentucky is one of the most well known Karst landscapes. What is a Karst landscape? From Wikipedia: “Karst is a topography formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks such as limestone, dolomite, and gypsum. It is characterized by underground drainage systems with sinkholes and caves.”
Basically, the rocks under Kentucky are very porous and subject to dissolving sometimes. This also means there are a lot of underground caverns in Kentucky. Fort Knox is known to have used them to hide gold in. A sinkhole had opened up in a fast food restaurant a couple towns away, a couple weeks before I visited. The residents are no stranger to sinkholes. But this one, was a little something different. I don’t know whether I was interested because of the size of it, because of the type of artifacts affected or just because it happened in a museum. Maybe all of those factored in to my interest for this museum visit.
The National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is classic Americana. From the outside, the first thing you notice is the unique architecture of the building, the second thing you notice is the parking lot and just how many Corvettes are sitting in it. Corvette enthusiasts come from all over the States, and the world, to visit this one of a kind museum. Behind the museum complex, you will find the NCM Motorsport Park with a list of events to get out onto the track yourself.
Inside, it feels both modern and classic with it’s dark blue, grey and red accents. There is a cafe decorated like a 1950’s diner, a library and archives, a gift shop, an area for maintenance and preservation, and a place to pick up your Corvette if you specified that you’d like to do so when you ordered it. Yes, we did see someone taking home their new Corvette, driving it out of the building and into the world. All of this, plus the actual exhibition spaces!
Our little group gets our tickets and waits a few minutes to join a guided tour, which happens a few times a day and are free to join. Our tour guide is a pleasant older gentleman, who introduces himself, tells us how long the tour will be and tells us about the history of the museum getting started. The about the museum section of their website goes into great detail about their beginnings if you’d like to learn more, but it started with a recognized need to preserve historic materials, and provide easier access to them for people who restored Corvettes. As a person who greatly loves the preservation of historic items, I can get behind what they were doing.
We get started on our tour; the exhibitions in the museum are really well done, bringing the history of the museum to life through displays, text, videos and of course, the cars themselves. We are led through the winding history of the Corvette car from first inception to current models. I usually prefer to read all the text panels and make my companions wait for me, but our tour guide was highly knowledgeable so I don’t think I missed out on too much of the information, and I spent a lot of time admiring the exhibits while listening. Then, we get to what we came for – the story of the sinkhole or as they call it, the Corvette Cave In Exhibit.
Back in 2014, in the wee hours of the morning, the security cameras at the National Corvette Museum caught something wildly different than usual. A sink hole opening up underneath the Skydome of the museum, and dropping eight Corvettes on display down into the gaping hole. Luckily, no one was in the building at that time. The cave underneath the collapse was quite big. You can see that security footage online as the cave in made headlines nationally and internationally. As the website says, museum visitation went up that year, the sinkhole was filled but interest still remains to this day. The exhibition space itself detailing the events of that day and the aftermath opened 2 years later in 2016. However, this event showcasing what a force nature can be was understandably upsetting to many both in the museum and among Corvette enthusiasts, so much so, that there is a way around this exhibition for those who just can’t bear witnessing it again.
Like the rest of the museum’s exhibit spaces, this one is really well done and we spend some time looking at the security footage and everything else in the area. The exhibition includes an interactive where you can rescue a fallen Corvette and place it safely back in the garage, information on karst landscapes, a model of the cave showing where each car fell to in the cave, how they filled in the sinkhole and that their Skydome is very safe now, and finally, a mini cave with a virtual experience of a cave-in.
Exiting this exhibit area, we enter into the Skydome itself. Now outlined on the floor, you can see just how massive the sinkhole was. There is even a window in the floor to look down into the cave. The eight Corvettes that had fallen to the sinkhole were on display, though not all of them had been repaired. Our tour guide tells us that all of the Corvettes that fell in, were owned by the museum, and not on loan (for a museum professional, this was great news to hear, imagine having to tell the owner of an artifact that a sinkhole got it!). Our tour group all had a thorough look around the area and from our Guide, continued to learn about the other cars under the Skydome, which includes pace cars and each generation of Corvette – one for every year, including the only 1983 Corvette in the world. There are also Corvette Hall of Fame Inductees lining the walls of the dome.
Our tour continued into the Exhibit Hall which continues to feature Corvettes and other special cars and exhibits before our tour guide finishes up with the information that we can “exit through the gift shop” (how else would a museum tour wrap up?). In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this visit, and not just for the sinkhole, the cars displayed and the history behind them were intriguing too.
The National Corvette Museum did shut down for a period of time during the COVID-19 closures, but has since re-opened to guests with new procedures in place. However, if you’re too far away, or just not yet comfortable heading out to a museum, on their website they do have new online videos to check out, more information about the cave-in including a virtual tour of the cave, an online version of the store and it is packed full of both historic information and information to plan a potential future trip.
Website:
Hours:
Open 8am-5pm CT, Seven Days a Week
The last admission tickets are sold by 4:30pm CT. (Though they recommend giving yourself 1-2 hours to see it all.)
Holidays Closed: New Year’s Day, Easter, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day
Admission:
$12 Adults (13-61)
$10 Seniors (62 +)
$7 Youth (5-12)
4 and under Free
NCM Members Free
Active Military Free
Discounted rates offered for registered groups of 15 or more people.
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