“I Owe My Soul to the Company Store”

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Part of the “privilege,” as it were, of growing up in Kentucky is hearing about coal mining. The songs are filled with it (I did a top ten coal mining songs last year), and the news headlines reported more than one “incident” (what a nice, flowery way of saying miners were killed in underground cave-ins, fires, or explosions ). That background led me to the Blue Heron Mine Camp Museum, maintained by the National Park Service. It is located inside the Big South Fork National Recreation Area, which is a lovely expanse across southern Kentucky and northern Tennessee. The mine camp, near the town of Stearns (which was named for the coal company’s owner, Justus Stearns) is a very unique museum and interactive experience. Instead of rebuilding structures and adorning them in “period” furniture, the grounds are preserved with shelters, built with metal restraint walls showing where the buildings once stood. This comes in very handy when you get to an area, such as the bath house, where some of the foundations remain. In each “building” you will find recordings of individuals who lived in the camps played from an oral history project, as well as view displays of items that were popular among the mining community (see the photo of items from the company story). There’s also a tunnel entrance (you can’t go in very far, but you can get an idea of how low the ceilings were for miners), a walkway across the Big South Fork River that also lets you stand on the “top floor” of the tipple building above coal cars, a description of the mining process, three different coal railroad cars (based on their tonnage), and a small book store and concession stand. It is an outdoor museum, and the displays are in the approximate location that they were in the mine camp’s life, so expect a lot of walking. Very little, if any, is handicapped-accessible, simply due to the nature of the terrain and the “authenticity” of the camp. Admission is free, both to the Recreation Area and the mining camp. It’s hardly a traditional museum, but then coal mining was hardly a “traditional” way of life. It was superb.