Burnam's Hole

A limestone shaft in Burnet County was called Burnam's hole until sometime after the Civil War, and then it acquired the name it carries now, because of what was thrown down it. The state marker at the mouth says the pit is believed to have received up to seventeen bodies, and names the pro-Union judge John R. Scott, a German settler called Adolph Hoppe, several Reconstruction era county officials, and Ben McKeever, who had a conflict with local freedmen. The marker hedges twice, with believed and with up to. The Handbook of Texas is narrower still and says only that several bodies were recovered from the cave in the late 1860s. The two state accounts disagree about almost everything else as well, and the Handbook was revised in March 2025 specifically to correct the marker.

Where the marker credits an entomologist named Ferdinand Lueders with the earliest recorded discovery in 1821, the Handbook says there is no reliable information about who found it. Where the marker says powerful gases prevented thorough exploration until 1951, the Handbook says spelunkers from the University of Texas went down in the 1950s and 1960s and reported bad air in the lower section. The Handbook also states flatly that the shaft was dissolved out of limestone rather than blown open by gas pressure.

The Texas Speleological Society platted it in 1968 at 155 feet deep: a five by six foot entrance, a twenty nine foot drop to a ledge, another hundred and three feet below that, then a fissure and a final pit. An oak that once stood over the mouth was said to carry rope marks. Ona Lou Roper deeded the shaft and six and a half acres to Burnet County in 1999, and the mouth is under a metal grate.