And you heard Kelsey mention they're one of the region's biggest attractions.

Mammoth cave, the world's longest underground cave system, draws in nearly 600,000 people each year.

Cave City in Barren County is home to Mammoth Cave National Park.

Over the years, the city has gone from a place to pass through on the way to the cave, to a place to stop and explore.

As our Kentucky Edition crew discovered when they met on the road.

Cave city is a roadside attraction.

It was a place that people came and built up to draw people off the interstate on their way to somewhere else, and we've always had that mentality.

We have the national park, which is a huge tourist draw and has been for many, many years for us.

But it's also, still got that quirkiness about it.

From Dinosaur World to the wigwams that were built in the 30s here.

And then it's got that small town feel you can as on your way from the interstate down to Broadway, you're passing a cornfield right next to downtown.

We used to have Gun Tail Mountain here, and it was huge case.

It used to be huge with tourism.

Everybody came to go mountain.

And then when the town mountain kind of went out of it, kind of that awful little.

And we want people to say that we still have great things here, and we've got new things coming out.

Our businesses have grown.

We've got a lot more things going on here.

But the biggest increase that I've noticed is there are movies that we've been doing here.

I'm also on the Southern Kentucky Film Commission.

I'm the vice president of that, and we have worked really, really hard to bring in a lot of movies from Hollywood.

And, we've been very successful at that recently, and that has increased tourism tremendously.

Is that a huge economic increase for us?

You know, those people that come in and film here, they stay here, they eat here.

And that's where the magic happens.

This is where for the longest time, we had been mentally trained.

That Mammoth cave is what brings people here.

And so we really didn't invest back in to keeping people here.

We're like, they're coming anyway.

But then they were not staying there like staying one night if that.

And then how do you turn that into two three nights.

What.

You have to have more things to do.

So finally, the, you know, people in office are starting to notice that downtown is also a destination and a draw, something we did here to get people to be downtown and invest downtown as we started cars and coffee.

So we did that five years ago.

We were like, how do we get people downtown and how do we get people to maybe bars in these buildings that have the money and love old things?

And I was like people that collect old cars.

I got a couple cars, they got money and they love old things.

So we started doing that and became wildly successful, and we were bringing people downtown.

So it was helping our citizens to have something to do, to gather.

It was bringing in people from other places to come and look, and then it just boosted morale up.

We've been able to, our infrastructure downtown with with new, benches, new planters, new flowers, all of that type of thing.

So, yes, downtown is really beginning to come alive.

I think in the last year we've opened like 12 new small businesses here in Cape City and new I wanted to open Cape City.

That's my hometown.

I've always wanted to give back to the community and bring something to my area.

And when we found this location, it's right on the pathway to Mammoth Cave.

So 1.2 million visitors come, you know, every year to our area.

And there are some things that can't be bought.

Location is one of those things.

My mom, my sister and I, you bought a building and opened a bar, and we use that as an economic driver to do other things in town.

We knew that if you created nightlife, if you brought people down here, you could bring in more tax dollars and we could use that money to help infrastructure elsewhere.

The building beside it, what we're in now, the Ace Theater, was available, and so I just renovated it.

It was started with the dive.

And then across the street, Cave City Pizza came in and now we have food downtown.

And so we're like, grateful for that.

And then we have a yoga studio that also has a retail space and two, you know, two distilleries come and now we have another restaurant, porters, that just opened up.

So Ace Coffee, our motto is cultivate, cura, elevate and educate.

I wanted to make this more like a cultural hub and center, but really it was a third place.

So the thing that saved small town America and the thing that helps all of us is a third place, a place in between work and home where we gather, we talk with people.

We meet new friends, like minded people, new business opportunities.

It creates ideas.

It gets us off of our cell phones.

And we didn't have that in Cave City.

And I want to come back.

And that's what I want people to say.

I want to go back there.

Next time I go back, I want to try this place or I want to try that place.

You know, I want them to not have enough time to do all the things that they want it to do.

I want my kids to see opportunity here, and hopefully one day I want to come back and call this home.

We know the potential like we see it.

We see that the days gone by and we see what it can be.

We just have to get everybody else on board with us.

City is also focused on agritourism, with several farms and orchards for people to sample and pick their own produce and fruit.

And each year it holds the Cave City Watermelon Festival, its largest festival, celebrating the town's reputation for producing some of the sweetest watermelons around.