Location
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Coordinates: 36.4016, -80.2997.
Type: Stop
Tour: Wachovia
County: Stokes
Partial
The trail to the Tory’s Den has rough ground, sometimes steep with uneven steps, and thus is inaccessible for most people with mobility issues. However, an information board can be viewed from the parking lot above the cave’s mouth. The house at our second stop is fully visible from a vehicle, and the ground is relatively flat.
Mysteries of the Cave
Evidence is limited for the Tory’s Den stories on this page. The first seems based only on local traditions, repeated in several sources with different details and contradicted by another. The second comes mostly from a preacher who collected wartime stories in the mid-1800s, Rev. E.W. Caruthers, though the basic facts are backed by eyewitness accounts.[1] This cave is one of three identified as the Den by 1800s newspaper articles. So believe with caution!
Walk to the Tory’s Den Trail head at the far end of the parking lot—not the one across from the first lot entrance, though a sign there bears the name, too. Take the trail approximately a quarter-mile to its end at a small cave.
Much of the fighting in North Carolina during the American Revolution was a civil war between people backing independence (Patriots or “Whigs”) and those supporting Great Britain (Loyalists or “Tories”). Two events of that “war within a war” may have occurred here.