A coal town rebuilt as open steel outlines of the buildings that stood there
Blue Heron, also known as Mine 18, was a coal town on the banks of the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River in McCreary County, Kentucky, run as a company town by the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company. The company's headquarters stood in the town of Stearns, founded by Justus Smith Stearns, and now houses the McCreary County Museum. The Blue Heron mines opened in 1937 and worked until December 1962, when the underground mines closed because they no longer paid. In those years hundreds of people lived and worked in this isolated community on the river.
When the company left in 1962, the town went with it. The buildings were removed or fell into decay, and by the time the National Park Service re-created the community in the 1980s as an outdoor museum, not one original building stood. Instead of reconstructing houses, it built ghost structures: open metal shells set on the approximate sites of the originals, as close to their size and orientation as possible. They include the railroad depot, a full-scale model of the coal tipple, the school, the church and homes.
Each ghost structure tells one part of life in the town, the school, the church or a woman's life, and the stories are told by former residents themselves, in audio programs in which the people who lived and worked here share their memories, beside exhibit cases of photographs and everyday objects. The depot is the place to begin. It holds a model of the town in its heyday in the 1950s, a model of the tipple and bridge, and the story of the Stearns company's timber, railroad and mining operations.
Blue Heron lies inside the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, established on 7 March 1974 across parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, country with one of the highest concentrations of natural bridges in the eastern United States.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
