An educational plaque focused on the history of the Karst system in Perry County was unveiled on the courthouse square Monday, June 15.
The plaque was a collaborative effort, it was designed by Scott House of the Cave research foundation, a conservationist non-profit based in Kentucky, and Josh Cooper, president of a cave exploration club based in Perryville. Funding came from the L-A-D Foundation, and the sign mounts were placed by the City of Perryville.
House said he wanted to spread awareness about the history of the area’s Karst system and the benefits of settling on the landscape.
“What you hear about too often is that karst is a problem. You have sinkholes that flood sewage and everything else, but there were good reasons why people settled here and particularly people of German descent settled here,” House said. “There were springs. In fact, one of the things in the city and in the county was there was a spring down the hill here. There were caves that lent themselves to storing beer, and beer is an important thing to Germanic peoples…you get more arable land because you don’t have valleys where the water is all going underground in sinkholes. So there were many advantages, and that’s kind of the history of this sign.”
The L-A-D Foundation, which provided funding for the sign, is a non-profit organization founded by Leo Drey, a St. Louis businessman who became interested in conservation efforts in the Ozarks in the 1950s.
Jennifer Battson Warren, executive director of the foundation, said their goal is to coordinate and collaborate on conservation efforts in smaller towns, and to protect natural and cultural resources that other state agencies or local community groups couldn’t protect. The foundation provided a grant that covered the design and construction of the sign. Warren said the Ball Miller Resurgence area, which the foundation acquired in 1978, is a great example of the Karst system that the plaque is dedicated to, and the importance of conserving it.
“At the Ball Miller Resurgence, there’s an area where the water comes back up out of the ground,” Warren said. “It rolls when there’s a lot of rainfall and it actually rolls rocks into balls basically, so that drives the point home of the importance of good watershed management and keeping water clean, because we’ve got some rare endangered species that live in these karst systems and Leo was interested in protecting those. With endangered species there’s a lot of benefit to educate people about water quality and those kinds of things, and Perryville has embraced that so we’re happy to help.”
The sign is the tenth to be built in the county, and five more are currently in different stages of development. Two have been written and planned, and three are in the writing stage. They will be built at the Perry Park Center, and Viola Blechle Park.
