BENTON -- [AP] The old sinkhole on Sink Hole Hill still has 'em baffled in Benton.
Some have suggested the mysterious pool is the crater of an extinct volcano. Others have claimed an earthquake, Indians, a glacier or meteorite made the sink hole. Supposedly, it is bottomless and full of blind fish.
Bill Morgan, whose family owns the sinkhole, doesn't know its origin. "But when I was in the seventh grade we had a Kentucky history book, and the sinkhole was in it," remembered Morgan, 72.
Masked by a screen of tall trees, the steep-banked sinkhole pocks a red gravel rise about two miles south of Benton, the Marshall County seat. It's in a grassy pasture next to U.S. 641.
The late Hatler Morgan, Bill Morgan's father, said old-timers claimed the puzzling pond was gouged by a glacier or mashed out by a meteorite.
"They said it was bottomless, too," Bill Morgan added.
Tales abound about men and boys plumbing the dark depths of the sinkhole with weighted lines and not hitting bottom. Hatler Morgan never tried it. "Didn't want to maybe ruin a good story," he said.
About a century ago, a Mayfield Monitor newspaper correspondent visited the sinkhole and described it as a "lake about fifty yards in width and one hundred and fifty yards in length." Since, the sinkhole has shrunk to about 20-by-30 yards.
"The remarkable part of it is that this sheet of water . . . rests on the brow of an elevation 150 feet high," the Monitor story said. "The water is exceedingly clear, and rain and drought have no effect upon the stage of the water."
The writer surmised that the pool wasn't spring-fed because it froze over in winter. Nonetheless, the Monitor said that supposedly "all manner of fish abound in its clear depths."
Bill Morgan isn't so sure. "But I've never seen any blind ones," he said.
In addition, the Monitor cited a legend that Native Americans dug the sinkhole to hide their valuables from invading white settlers. "Finally, the mighty interior of the moat filled with water," covering the treasure forever, the paper explained.
But the Monitor conceded that according to another story, "in the remote past a volcanic eruption or earthquake caused this phenomenon."
The sinkhole was a popular spot with Marshall countians when Bill Morgan was a boy.
"We had Sunday school class picnics out there. Of course, when we were kids, we thought the sinkhole was so deep it went all the way to China," Morgan said.
