Appalachian Figures
On November 29, 2024, Robert Elledy “Bob” Gable died in Lexington at the age of ninety. Obituaries described him as a Navy veteran, Stanford trained engineer, governor’s candidate, arts patron, and for seven years the chair of the Republican Party of Kentucky. Beneath that public résumé is a story that belongs squarely in Appalachian history.
Gable was the great grandson of Justus S. Stearns, the Michigan lumber baron who built Stearns Coal and Lumber Company and the company town of Stearns in McCreary County. As a young businessman, Bob moved into that Appalachian company town and helped manage it through the last years of deep coal mining and into a new world of real estate and tourism. Later, from Frankfort, he poured the same organizational energy into building the modern Kentucky GOP.
His life bridged eras. He grew up far from the Cumberland Plateau, in Oregon and Arizona. He came of age in the postwar boom and then spent decades navigating the long decline of Central Appalachian coal. Along the way he became a key behind the scenes figure in a political realignment that transformed Kentucky from a Democratic stronghold into a Republican dominated state.
This is the story of how a man rooted in a southern Kentucky coal and timber empire helped remake both his hometown and his state’s politics.
A Coal and Timber Inheritance
Long before Bob Gable was born, surveyors for his great grandfather’s company rode the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River and the Cincinnati Southern Railway, hunting timber and coal. By 1899 agents for Justus S. Stearns had assembled large blocks of land along the Kentucky Tennessee border, including the so called “Big Survey” of about thirty thousand acres. In 1902 they incorporated Stearns Coal and Lumber Company and opened their first mine that same year. Coal shipments began rolling out of the region by 1903.
The company built more than a mine. It created a company town at Stearns and a constellation of coal camps across McCreary County and into Tennessee. At its height the enterprise controlled well over two hundred thousand acres and operated at least eighteen camps where more than two thousand people lived and worked. The firm ran its own railroad, the Kentucky and Tennessee, plus company stores, bank, and recreational facilities. A golf course, ball fields, and theaters joined the more familiar sights of tipples, lumber yards, and rows of shotgun houses.
Stearns became one of the longest lived coal companies in Kentucky. When it finally sold out of mining in 1975, historians described it as the state’s oldest continuous coal operation.
One of the Stearns camps was Blue Heron, or Mine 18, a remote settlement along the Big South Fork where miners and their families lived between 1937 and 1962. After the mine closed, the buildings collapsed or were demolished. In the 1980s the National Park Service re created Blue Heron as a “ghost structure” museum, using open metal frames on the original foundations and audio programs built from recorded memories of former residents.
It was into this world of company towns, captive railroads, and camp communities like Blue Heron that Bob Gable stepped when he and his new wife Emily chose to make Stearns their home.
From New York and the West to Stearns, Kentucky
Robert Elledy Gable’s life did not begin in the mountains. He was born in New York City on February 20, 1934. After his father died, his mother moved the family west, first to Port Orford on the Oregon coast and later to Tucson, Arizona. Summers were spent with relatives in Michigan and Minnesota, where he grew familiar with the Stearns family’s northern roots along Lake Michigan.
Gable attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, then headed to Stanford University. He graduated in 1956 with a degree in industrial engineering, serving as student financial manager and president of his fraternity and earning membership in the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. Those roles foreshadowed the mix of numbers, management, and politics that would mark his career.
After Stanford, he served as a naval officer. Friends later recalled that he regarded the Navy as a formative experience in leadership. When his service ended he married Emily Brinton Thompson in Bar Harbor, Maine. The newlyweds faced a choice about where to build their life. Instead of remaining in coastal New England or returning to the West, they chose the family business and the hills of southern Kentucky.
Sometime in the late 1950s, Bob and Emily moved to Stearns in McCreary County. For roughly a decade they raised three children there while he joined the management ranks of Stearns Coal and Lumber Company.
Stearns in the Gable Years
By the time Gable arrived, Stearns was a mature company town. Coal had been mined there for more than half a century. The surrounding hills were checkerboarded with logged over tracts, rail spurs, and coal camps. The population depended heavily on the company for wages, housing, health care, and recreation.
According to later development reports, Stearns still functioned as a classic company town in mid century. The firm owned most of the land and buildings, provided basic infrastructure and water, and sponsored amenities like theaters, pool halls, tennis courts, and that improbable mountain golf course.
From his perch in the corporate offices, Gable helped guide the company through a period of transition. A Herald Leader obituary written shortly after his death describes him working with senior leadership to develop a major new mine as part of a broader strategy to modernize operations and then unwind the “last company town” in Kentucky, shifting company assets toward real estate and other investments.
At the same time, Stearns began exiting some of its more remote coal properties. Blue Heron shut down in 1962. Other camps followed as seams played out or markets shifted. Eventually much of the old Stearns coal land ended up inside the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, created in the 1970s to conserve the gorge and its tributaries.
Even after the company sold its last mines in 1975 and focused on real estate projects such as the Hyatt Regency in Lexington, its loose ends stayed with Gable. A 2012 story about Stearns Coal and Lumber’s remaining mineral rights in McCreary County quoted him as essentially the company’s last employee, still tending to long running legal and property questions decades after the tipples went silent.
Throughout these years he spoke often about Stearns and McCreary County in interviews and oral histories. Recordings held at the University of Kentucky’s Nunn Center and Eastern Kentucky University’s Berge Oral History Center capture his memories of managing Stearns, dealing with new environmental rules under the Clean Air Act, and watching places like Blue Heron fade from active mining camps into heritage sites.
For a time, the Gables’ life followed the rhythm of an Appalachian company town: children in company schools, church and civic life in a place where the firm’s name was on everything from pay envelopes to the depot.
From Company Town to Campaign Trail
Gable’s route into politics started not in Frankfort but in neighboring Tennessee. In the 1960s he helped his friend Howard H. Baker Jr. in Baker’s U.S. Senate races. That work plugged the Stearns executive into a growing network of moderate Southern Republicans who were beginning to challenge Democratic dominance in the region.
He soon turned that experience homeward. In 1967 he signed on with Louie B. Nunn’s campaign for Kentucky governor. Nunn’s victory made him the first Republican to win the office in two decades. Rewarding his efforts, Nunn appointed Gable as Commissioner of Kentucky State Parks. The Gable family left Stearns for Frankfort in 1968 so he could take up the post.
The parks job proved important on several fronts. It gave Gable statewide visibility and management experience far beyond the coalfields. It also kept him traveling, meeting local officials and activists in every corner of the Commonwealth. While he remained connected to Stearns Coal and Lumber as an executive and director, he was now equally at home in the capital’s corridors of power.
When Nunn left office in 1971, Gable stepped back into private business but did not leave politics. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1972 and lost. Three years later he set his sights even higher.
A Long Shot for Governor
In 1975, in a Kentucky that still voted overwhelmingly Democratic, Gable won the Republican nomination for governor. His opponent in the general election was Julian Carroll, the incumbent Democrat, who enjoyed the advantages of incumbency and a strong party machine.
Gable’s campaign is remembered for its mix of earnest policy talk and bold symbolism. In one televised debate he brought a hand bell to the stage and rang it whenever he believed Carroll misstated the facts. The “truth bell” stunt earned him a burst of attention and later became a metaphor for his approach to campaign ethics. Commentators would return to that image decades later when discussing modern misinformation and money in politics.
The vote was not close. Official results show Carroll winning with about 470,159 votes (62.84 percent) to Gable’s 277,998 (37.16 percent). The Republican carried only a minority of counties, mostly in traditionally conservative areas, while Carroll cruised almost everywhere else.
Yet Gable’s 1975 run mattered far beyond the numbers. It forced Republicans to build a more serious statewide campaign organization, invest in media and fundraising, and think about appealing to urban and minority voters. It also cemented his reputation as a reform minded figure. He campaigned on government ethics and financial transparency, themes that would follow him into his party leadership years.
He tried once more for the governor’s office in 1995, entering a crowded Republican primary as a veteran of the party’s early modern era. That race ended in defeat as well, but it served as the backdrop for a major legal battle over Kentucky’s system of public financing for campaigns. In Gable v. Patton, he and other plaintiffs challenged a “trigger” provision that gave additional public funds to candidates whose opponents spent beyond a certain threshold. The federal courts ultimately upheld the law, but the case is still cited in debates over campaign finance.
Building a Party from the Ground Up
Gable’s most enduring political influence came not from his own candidacies but from his work as party chair.
In 1986 he became chairman of the Republican Party of Kentucky. At that point, Republicans held only one statewide office, and the party’s coffers were famously thin. Senator Mitch McConnell would later recall that the state GOP’s net worth was only a few hundred dollars when Gable took the helm.
Over the next seven years he helped professionalize the party. He focused on fund raising, candidate recruitment, and building local organizations in counties where Republicans had long been an afterthought. Commentators and fellow Republicans frequently described him as a “foundation” figure for the modern Kentucky GOP and even an “unsung hero” of its eventual dominance.
As chair, Gable served on the Republican National Committee and became a familiar presence at national gatherings. He also waded into the complexities of campaign finance and ethics. In 1988, for example, the Republican Party of Kentucky, acting through its chair, was involved in a complaint to the Federal Election Commission that became Matter Under Review 2573. That case revolved around alleged coordination and spending irregularities and offers a glimpse of how seriously Gable took the rules of political money, even as his party pushed for more aggressive fund raising.
Later, his role as a plaintiff in Gable v. Patton put him on the other side of regulators, this time arguing that Kentucky’s public financing system infringed on candidates’ First Amendment rights. Whatever one thinks about that position, it underscores how deeply he engaged with the legal structures that govern elections.
Interestingly, Gable was also known for holding some positions that placed him at odds with much of his party’s later base, including support for abortion rights. That detail, noted in contemporary obituaries and tributes, highlights his roots in an older, more socially moderate Republican tradition that once had a foothold in Kentucky.
By the time he stepped down as chair, the Kentucky GOP was far stronger financially and organizationally than the struggling outfit he had inherited. The party’s eventual rise to legislative and statewide dominance in the early twenty first century owed much to the infrastructure he helped put in place.
Stearns, Ludington, and the Work of Memory
Even while juggling business and politics, Gable devoted considerable energy to preserving the history of his family and its enterprises.
In Ludington, Michigan, overlooking Stearns Park on Lake Michigan, stands Lake Forest, a cottage built by Justus S. Stearns in 1903. A 2015 feature in the Mason County Press describes Lake Forest as the summer home of Bob and Emily Gable and notes that Bob had commissioned historian Mike Nagle to write a full length biography titled Justus S. Stearns: Michigan Pine King and Kentucky Coal Baron, 1845–1933.
Gable did more than commission a book. Records from the Mason County Research Center list him as the donor for a trove of Stearns related material: CDs of photographs, Kentucky images of Stearns, board of directors minutes for Stearns Coal and Lumber, drafts and materials for Nagle’s book, and other printed communications about Justus Stearns and the company.
When the city of Ludington debated charging non residents to park at Stearns Park, a 2017 Associated Press story quoted Gable arguing that his great grandfather intended the park to remain free for the public. Reading that piece, you can hear a descendant trying to uphold both the contractual language of a deed and the spirit of a philanthropic gift made a century earlier.
Back in McCreary County, the old Stearns company headquarters houses the McCreary County Museum. The surrounding town now markets itself less as a coal camp and more as a gateway to the Big South Fork and the Big South Fork Scenic Railway. That tourist railroad, supported in part by federal grants, carries visitors from Stearns down into the gorge and on to re created coal camps like Barthell and the ghost structures at Blue Heron.
Gable’s donations of corporate records and his willingness to be interviewed for oral history projects helped ensure that this new tourist economy would be anchored in real historical memory rather than nostalgia alone. Instead of letting the story of Stearns be told only through abandoned tipples and depots, he put board minutes, family correspondence, and his own recollections into the hands of archivists and scholars.
A Life that Ties Company Towns to Statewide Power
When Senator Mitch McConnell spoke on the Senate floor in December 2024, he called Bob Gable a “titanic figure” in the Kentucky Republican Party and traced his own earliest political memories to Gable’s work.
For Appalachian history, though, Gable’s importance lies in how he connects a local story to broader currents.
He was born on the East Coast, raised on the Pacific Rim and in the desert Southwest, but chose to root his adult life in a coal and timber town on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau. He spent crucial years trying to modernize and then gracefully unwind a company town that had dominated McCreary County’s economy for generations. He carried lessons from that experience into Frankfort, where he helped retool a minority party into a powerhouse and wrestled, often literally in court, with the rules governing money and politics.
At the same time, he quietly became one of the principal stewards of the Stearns family legacy, donating photographs and minutes, commissioning history, and speaking up whenever he felt the intentions of earlier generations were being misread.
For residents of Stearns and McCreary County, Gable’s story helps explain how their community traveled from coal camp to heritage railway town. For students of Kentucky politics, it offers a window into how a soft spoken businessman from a remote Appalachian county played a decisive role in reshaping the state’s political map.
In the end, Bob Gable was both a product of the coal camp world and one of the people who helped usher it, and his party, into something new.
Sources & Further Reading
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky. “Kentucky Politics: Robert E. Gable Oral History Project” (Interviews, March 19 and April 6, 2007). Kentucky Oral History+1
William H. Berge Oral History Center, Eastern Kentucky University. “Interview with Robert Gable,” focusing on Stearns Coal and Lumber, Blue Heron coal camp, and environmental regulation. Western Kentucky University
“Robert Elledy Gable” obituary, Lexington Herald Leader / Legacy.com, December 2024. Legacy
U.S. Senate, Congressional Record. Mitch McConnell, “Remembering Bob Gable,” December 19, 2024. GovInfo+1
U.S. House of Representatives, Congressional Record. Andy Barr, “Honoring Robert Gable,” April 4, 2014. Congress.gov+1
Federal Election Commission. The Republican Party of Kentucky (MUR 2573), 1988. FEC.gov
Gable v. Patton, 142 F.3d 940 (6th Cir. 1998), as discussed in later campaign finance scholarship. vLex+1
Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, “Kentucky Narratives: Bob Gable” video and companion article, 2019. The Bottom Line+1
Tom Des Jean, “Stearns Coal and Lumber Company,” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Tennessee Encyclopedia
National Park Service, Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. “Blue Heron” (Mine 18) site history. National Park Service
U.S. Economic Development Administration. “EDA Puts Former Kentucky Coal and Timber Community on the Right Track for Tourism,” success story on Stearns and the Big South Fork Scenic Railway, November 14, 2023. U.S. Economic Development Administration
Rob Alway, “The Cottage that Stearns Built” and “WSCC Professor Authors Book on the Legacy of Justus Stearns,” Mason County Press, 2015. MasonCountyPress.com+1
Mason County Research Center, donor and collection records under “Robert Gable,” including Stearns board minutes, photographs, and book materials. Mason County Research+1
Kevin Braciszeski, “Deed outlines history of Stearns Park as city considers parking fee for non residents,” Associated Press, March 22, 2017. AP News
Kentucky Lantern, “Bob Gable, heir to coal and timber empire, helped build modern Kentucky GOP from the ground up,” November 30, 2024, and related commentary on his “truth bell” and ethics work. Kentucky Lantern+2Kentucky Lantern+2
Northern Kentucky Tribune, “Former Kentucky Republican Party Chair Robert Gable dead at age 90,” November 30, 2024. NKyTribune
Scott Jennings, “Kentucky Republicans honor Bob Gable,” Courier Journal, August 25, 2017. Courier Journal
“1975 Kentucky Gubernatorial Election,” summary of official vote totals, via Elect.ky.gov as reproduced in reference works. Wikipedia+1