Wigwam Village No. 2

The Wigwam Villages were the creation of Frank Redford, a Kentucky businessman who became captivated by the teepee form and used it to build eye-catching roadside lodging. His idea was pure roadside marketing: a cluster of giant white teepees along a highway would catch the eye of passing motorists and pull them in for the night, a novelty that sold itself.

Redford built a small chain of these villages across the country, numbering them, and the Cave City court is No. 2, completed in 1937. Each unit is a freestanding conical structure of steel frame and stuccoed concrete, painted white with zigzag trim, ringed around a central lodge. Only a few of the villages survive today, and the Kentucky one is among the best preserved.

The village's name and design draw on romanticized 20th-century imagery of Native American life rather than accurate representation. The white concrete cones follow the shape of a Plains teepee, a portable hide dwelling, not a wigwam, which is a different, dome-shaped structure of other Native peoples. The two words were often used loosely in the era's popular culture.

Kentucky itself was long a shared hunting ground and homeland of Native nations, including the Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Yuchi, and Osage, whose descendant nations continue today, most having been removed westward to Oklahoma and southward to the Carolinas. The village is best appreciated as a period piece of American roadside marketing and architecture, a window into how mid-century highway culture packaged imagery, rather than as any authentic reflection of Native heritage.

Wigwam Village No. 2 dates from the heyday of the automobile motor court, when the rise of the family car and long-distance driving created a new kind of roadside lodging. Before interstate highways and chain motels, courts like this one lined the two-lane highways, competing for travelers with novelty, comfort, and easy parking right at the door.

The old Dixie Highway on which it sits was a major early auto route running south toward Florida, carrying vacationers through Kentucky's cave country. As interstates later bypassed such roads, most of the era's motor courts vanished. The Wigwam Village endured, and today it stands as a rare, intact example of the architecture and optimism of the early American road trip.

The village sits in Cave City, a town whose whole economy grew up around the caves that riddle the limestone beneath this part of Kentucky. The streets nearby are lined with show caves, roadside attractions, and the kind of family stops that have drawn travelers for generations.

Just to the west lies the crown jewel of the region, Mammoth Cave National Park, protecting the longest cave system known on earth, with hundreds of miles of mapped passages and ranger-led tours into its depths. Between the underground wonder of Mammoth Cave and the concrete teepees of a 1930s motor court, this stretch of Kentucky offers both natural grandeur and a heavy dose of classic roadside Americana.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.