The Widow Jane Mine is not a cave. It is a room and pillar cement mine, the oldest on the Snyder Estate at Rosendale, New York, and the largest of the mines there. Cutting into the hillside, the miners left standing pillars of dolomite to hold up the rock above them, and the result reads like an underground pillared hall rather than a tunnel.
What came out of it was Rosendale natural cement, which set hard under water and was used in the Brooklyn Bridge, the base of the Statue of Liberty and other nineteenth century works that had to survive being wet. The mine sits within the Snyder Estate Natural Cement Historic District, which also preserves a stretch of the Delaware and Hudson Canal bed, a waste weir, a reservoir that kept the canal full in dry spells, and the boat slip the company built for Snyder, possibly the only original slip surviving anywhere along the canal.
The deep workings are flooded with groundwater and always have standing water on the floor, which is part of why the place looks the way it does: pillars rising out of a still, dark sheet of water in an enormous low room.
The acoustics are the reason many people come. Sound in a flooded pillared chamber behaves unlike anything above ground, and concerts and other events are held in the mine through the summer.
It is looked after by the Century House Historical Society, and the room and pillar entrance is the part open to visitors.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
