Appalachian Community Histories – Stearns, McCreary County: Company Stores, Mine Camps, and the Big South Fork
Stearns does not look like a place that happened by accident. Its story begins with timber, coal, railroads, and one of the most powerful company-town systems in southern Kentucky. In McCreary County, where the Cumberland Plateau breaks into ridges, creeks, hollows, and river gorges, Stearns became more than a mining town. It became the office, store, railroad, and administrative center of a larger industrial world.
The National Register of Historic Places recognized that role when the Stearns Administrative and Commercial District was listed in 1988. The district, centered along Old U.S. 27, was significant for commerce and community planning and development. Its important years included 1903, 1907, and 1928, dates that trace the rise of the company office, the business district, and the larger public face of the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company.
That company presence can still be read in the landscape. The old administrative building, the company store, the confectionery, the commercial buildings, the freight warehouse, and the rail corridor were not separate pieces of town life. They were parts of one system. The National Register nomination described the administrative and commercial buildings as a group that still communicated the sense of time and place associated with company towns and the industrial era in which they thrived.
Justus S. Stearns and the Big South Fork
The name Stearns came from Justus Smith Stearns, a Michigan lumberman whose business interests reached south into Kentucky and Tennessee at the turn of the twentieth century. The larger Stearns enterprise came into the region in 1902. It rose quickly and, according to the National Park Service, left the coal business in 1975 when the Justus Mine was sold to Blue Diamond. In less than seventy-five years, the company’s lumber and coal operations had reshaped a large section of the Big South Fork country.
The company did not begin only with coal. Timber was one of the first attractions. A cultural resources report for the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area states that Justus S. Stearns sent W. A. Kinne into the Big South Fork region in the 1890s to buy land. By 1902, the Stearns interests had acquired large tracts in Tennessee and negotiated Kentucky leases tied to railroad construction, mine openings, and timber conversion.
The company town of Stearns was built at the old Gum Tree Tie Yard, where the Kentucky and Tennessee Railway connected with the Cincinnati, New Orleans and Texas Pacific Railway. That location mattered. It gave the company a place to mill timber, ship coal, store goods, manage records, and organize labor across a wide mountain landscape. Lumber was even sent from Ludington, Michigan, for early houses and Company Store Number 1. The sawmill built at Stearns in 1903 was described in the Big South Fork report as possibly one of the first electrically driven band mills in the United States.
The Railroad as the Spine of Stearns
The Kentucky and Tennessee Railway was the spine of the Stearns operation. Without it, the company’s timber, coal, and camp system could not have worked on the same scale. The railroad began as a way to reach company holdings, but it soon became the line that tied together Stearns, Barthell, Worley, Yamacraw, Oz, Cooperative, Blue Heron, and other camps.
The first Stearns coal shipment left Mine Number 1 at Barthell on June 1, 1903. From there, the company expanded along Roaring Paunch Creek, the Big South Fork, and Rock Creek. Mines opened, camps grew, tipples were built, and schools, stores, boarding houses, and houses followed the coal seams. The pattern was not random. The Big South Fork report summarized the Stearns model as beginning with mine entries, then a boarding house, store, dwellings, tipple work, and a schoolhouse as soon as possible.
Yamacraw became one of the most important points on that system. The Kentucky and Tennessee Railway reached Yamacraw by 1906, and the company built the present Yamacraw railroad bridge in 1907. The report described the 565-foot reinforced concrete arch bridge across the Big South Fork as an achievement in railway civil engineering and the first of its type built in the South.
The Nerve Center of an Industrial Empire
Stearns was not just one camp among many. The National Register nomination called it the nerve center of a 200-square-mile empire in McCreary and Wayne Counties in Kentucky and Fentress and Pickett Counties in Tennessee. That empire included lumber operations, coal mines, company towns, and the Kentucky and Tennessee Railroad, which linked the different pieces together.
The Stearns office building represented authority. The company store represented commerce. The railroad represented movement. The warehouse represented storage and distribution. Together, they made Stearns the place where decisions, goods, wages, transportation, and community life converged.
The town also developed during a moment when McCreary County itself was new. McCreary County was formed in 1912 from parts of Pulaski, Wayne, and Whitley Counties. Company officials rejected a proposal to make Stearns the county seat, and the town remained a company town while nearby Whitley City became the county seat.
Store Number 1 and Daily Life
In a company town, the store was more than a place to buy goods. It was a place where the company’s economic power met the daily life of workers and families. The National Park Service describes Store Number 1 in Stearns as the first company store constructed by the Stearns Company. The first floor housed the commissary, while the second floor held the post office, Stearns office, railroad supplies, and dry goods.
The company store was also a social center. It carried clothing, groceries, furniture, miners’ tools, and other goods. It also extended credit through scrip, which tied workers and families more closely to the company economy. W. A. Kinne stated that in 1928 the total retail business for all Stearns stores reached $1,000,000, a figure that shows how large the company’s commercial system had become.
Company towns were never only about coal and timber. They were also about schools, churches, doctors, sports, family routines, and the limits placed on private life by company ownership. Stearns had a business district, offices, housing, railroad facilities, stores, and recreational spaces. Even the Stearns Golf Course, later listed on the National Register, reflected the unusual reach of company-town planning in a rugged coal and timber landscape.
Work, Race, and the People Behind the Company
The formal company record can make Stearns look like a story of buildings, executives, mines, and rail lines. The human history was much larger. Workers came from the region and from outside it. They worked in mines, on railroads, in logging crews, in shops, in stores, in domestic work, and in support jobs that made the industrial system possible.
The National Park Service study “Invisible People” is especially important because it shows that African Americans were part of the Stearns and Upper Cumberland labor story, even when later memory often left them out. The study states that the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company employed a diverse workforce unusual in the Upper South during the early twentieth century. One Stearns Company physician went to Knoxville to recruit Black laborers for construction work between 1902 and 1904. Black workers also appear in logging, mining, and railroad operations, though African American coal miners remained relatively few.
That history complicates the image of the company town. Stearns was a place of opportunity for some workers, but it was also shaped by race, class, company authority, and unequal access to jobs and recognition. The photographs and oral histories left behind by former residents help restore people who were often present in the work but missing from the official story.
Blue Heron and Mine 18
One of the best-known parts of the Stearns story lies beyond the town itself, at Blue Heron, also known as Mine 18. The National Park Service identifies Blue Heron as an abandoned coal mining town that was part of the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company operation. The mines operated from 1937 until December 1962, when they were no longer profitable. Hundreds of people lived and worked in that isolated community along the Big South Fork River.
Blue Heron became a preservation and interpretation site because so much of the physical town disappeared. When Stearns abandoned Blue Heron in 1962, the buildings were removed or fell into decay. In the 1980s, the site was recreated with open metal “ghost structures” placed near the original building locations. The Park Service used those structures, exhibit cases, photographs, and audio programs to tell the story of the people who lived and worked there.
The Blue Heron tipple was the heart of that mining operation. The National Park Service describes it as modern and mechanized for its late 1930s opening. The company publicized it as costing a quarter of a million dollars at the new No. 18 Mine.
Depression, Forest Land, and a Legal Afterlife
The history of Stearns also reaches into national forest history. In 1937, Stearns Coal and Lumber Company conveyed 46,842.4 acres in Wayne and McCreary Counties to the United States, reserving certain mineral rights. The land was purchased under the Weeks Act and Clarke-McNary Act as part of the Cumberland National Forest, later the Daniel Boone National Forest.
That sale did not end the company’s connection to the land. Decades later, the meaning of the mineral reservation became the center of federal litigation. In United States v. Stearns Co., the dispute involved whether Stearns could strip mine coal under land conveyed to the government in 1937. The federal court found that Stearns could not engage in surface mining on the property without approval from the United States, and later appellate history continued the long legal afterlife of the deed.
This legal history matters because it shows how company-town history did not simply end when mines closed or buildings changed hands. The Stearns story remained tied to land ownership, mineral rights, federal conservation, and the later struggle over surface mining in eastern Kentucky.
Decline and Transition
The peak years did not last. In 1929, the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company had about 2,000 employees and produced nearly one million tons of coal, exceeded in Kentucky only by the Ford Mine at Lynch among individual mining companies. That same year, flooding destroyed mining camps at Worley and Yamacraw and swept away at least thirty houses, though the Yamacraw bridge survived.
By the early 1950s, the coal economy was changing. Railroads converted from coal-fired steam locomotives to diesel and electric power, and domestic and industrial heating markets shifted toward electricity, oil, and natural gas. Blue Heron closed in 1962. Oz Mine Number 16-2 closed in 1966. The sawmill burned, the company bank was dissolved, and utilities that had once belonged to the company passed to public or cooperative hands.
The Justus Mine opened in 1968 and briefly revived the company’s mining fortunes. It was sold to Blue Diamond Coal Company in 1975. By then, the Stearns system that had once organized work, housing, transportation, stores, and community life across the Big South Fork was being dismantled.
Stearns Remembered
Stearns today is not only a former company town. It is also a preservation landscape. The McCreary County Museum is housed in the old Stearns Coal and Lumber Company corporate headquarters, built in 1907, and the museum preserves documents, objects, photographs, and exhibits connected to Historic Stearns and McCreary County.
Downtown Stearns also stands near the Big South Fork Scenic Railway and the preserved memory of the Kentucky and Tennessee Railway. The old industrial corridor has become part of the way visitors encounter McCreary County history. A town once organized around extraction now helps interpret the coal, timber, railroad, and company-town world that shaped the county.
The story of Stearns is not simple nostalgia. It is a story of ambition, company power, hard labor, racial complexity, land control, environmental change, and preservation. It shows how a company town could become a center of order and opportunity, while also binding everyday life to one employer’s reach. It also shows how deeply coal and timber towns remain in the landscape long after the last regular coal trains have gone.
Stearns was built to serve an industrial empire. More than a century later, its buildings, museum, railroad, and nearby Blue Heron ghost structures still tell the story of that empire and of the people who lived inside it.
Sources & Further Reading
Polsgrove, Robert M. “Stearns Administrative and Commercial District.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. National Park Service, August 1988. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/e965a168-35d9-4fe3-836e-efce98201452
National Park Service. “Stearns Administrative and Commercial District.” National Register of Historic Places, NPGallery. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/e965a168-35d9-4fe3-836e-efce98201452
National Archives and Records Administration. “National Register of Historic Places, Kentucky, Single Property Listings.” https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_KY/SPFindAid_KY.pdf
United States v. Stearns Co., 595 F. Supp. 808. Eastern District of Kentucky, 1984. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/595/808/1683010/
United States v. Stearns Coal and Lumber Co., 816 F.2d 279. United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, 1987. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/873/134/432957/
National Park Service. “Blue Heron.” Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area. https://www.nps.gov/biso/learn/historyculture/blueheron.htm
National Park Service. “A Guide to the Blue Heron Community.” Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area. https://npshistory.com/publications/biso/brochures/blue-heron-community-2.pdf
National Park Service. “Train Depot.” Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area. https://www.nps.gov/biso/learn/historyculture/train-depot.htm
National Park Service. “Scrip.” Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area. https://www.nps.gov/biso/learn/historyculture/scrip.htm
National Park Service. “Tipple.” Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area. https://www.nps.gov/biso/learn/historyculture/tipple.htm
Des Jean, Tom. “Invisible People: Blacks at Big South Fork.” National Park Service, Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area. https://www.nps.gov/biso/learn/historyculture/invisible-people.htm
Des Jean, Tom. “Invisible People: Blacks at Big South Fork.” National Park Service, Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area. PDF edition. https://npshistory.com/publications/biso/invisible-people.pdf
National Park Service. “Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area: Architectural and Engineering Resources.” https://npshistory.com/publications/biso/arch-engr-res.pdf
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. “Big South Fork.” Abandoned Mine Lands Projects. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Abandoned-Mine-Lands/projects/Pages/Big_South_Fork.aspx
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Annual Report of the Department of Mines and Minerals, 1928.” University of Kentucky. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/DanielReportMines1928.pdf
Kentucky Geological Survey. “Annual Report of the Department of Mines and Minerals, 1936.” University of Kentucky. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/s_8/KGS8AR21936c.pdf
Eastern Kentucky University, William H. Berge Oral History Center. “Blue Heron Coal Camps.” https://oralhistory.eku.edu/collections/show/58
Eastern Kentucky University, William H. Berge Oral History Center. “Browse Interviews: Mine 18.” https://oralhistory.eku.edu/items/browse?tags=Mine+18
Eastern Kentucky University, William H. Berge Oral History Center. “Browse Interviews: Coal Camps.” https://oralhistory.eku.edu/items/browse?tags=coal+camps
Des Jean, Tom. “Stearns Coal and Lumber Company.” Tennessee Encyclopedia, March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/stearns-coal-and-lumber-company/
McCreary County Museum. “McCreary County Museum.” https://mccrearymuseum.com/
Kentucky Tourism. “McCreary County Museum.” https://www.kentuckytourism.com/explore/mccreary-county-museum-4010
Explore Kentucky Wildlands. “McCreary County Museum.” https://www.explorekywildlands.com/listing/mccreary-county-museum/1228/
McCreary County Heritage Foundation. “Mccreary County Heritage Foundation Inc.” Mightycause. https://www.mightycause.com/organization/Mccreary-County-Heritage-Foundation
Gregg, Jonathon. “Coal Mining Town Awarded Millions to Preserve History.” Spectrum News 1, December 8, 2023. https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisville/news/2023/12/08/mccreary-county-heritage-foundation-millions-in-grants
Coaleducation.org. “McCreary County, Kentucky Coal Camps.” https://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/coalcamps/mccreary_county.htm
Nagle, Michael W. Justus S. Stearns: Michigan Pine King and Kentucky Coal Baron, 1845–1933. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015. https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814341266/
Perry, L. E. McCreary Conquest: A Narrative History. Whitley City, KY: McCreary County Historical Society, 1979.
McCreary County Public Library. McCreary County: A Pictorial History: The Early Years. Whitley City, KY: McCreary County Public Library, 1980.
Stearns Coal and Lumber Company. Forty Years of Industry. Stearns, KY: Stearns Coal and Lumber Company, 1941.
Stearns Coal and Lumber Company. The Stearns Co-Operator. Vol. 2. September 1, 1916.
Kentucky Historical Society. “Lumber Mill, Stearns Coal and Lumber Company, Stearns, Kentucky.” Ronald Morgan Postcard Collection, 1953. https://history.ky.gov/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Yamacraw Bridge, Kentucky & Tennessee Railway. 5 Miles West of Stearns, KY.” https://history.ky.gov/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Camp Revu of 1502, Company 1502, Stearns, Kentucky.” June 30, 1936. https://history.ky.gov/
Forest History Society. “James D. Lacey Company Records, 1898–1959.” https://foresthistory.org/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Rugby Papers Addition 2, Folder 25: Stearns Coal & Lumber Co.” https://sos.tn.gov/tsla
Author Note: Stearns is one of those places where the buildings, railroad, museum, and nearby Blue Heron site still let readers see how a company town worked. I wrote this piece to preserve the coal, lumber, railroad, and community history behind one of McCreary County’s most important places.