Greenville: Coal Country and John Prine's Paradise

Greenville is the county seat of Muhlenberg County, established in seventeen ninety-eight, with the county named for Revolutionary War General Peter Muhlenberg and Greenville named for General Nathanael Greene. The county holds a distinction that shaped the entire American energy economy: Kentucky's first commercial coal mine opened here in eighteen twenty, a drift mine along the Green River in the village of Paradise, about ten miles from Greenville. By the nineteen seventies, Muhlenberg County was sometimes the single largest coal-producing county in the United States.

But the county is also known for what coal mining destroyed. Singer-songwriter John Prine grew up in suburban Chicago, but his parents were from Paradise, Kentucky. Peabody Coal's enormous strip-mining operation in the nineteen sixties demolished and buried the entire village to reach the coal beneath it. Prine's nineteen seventy-one song "Paradise" , "Daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River where Paradise lay" , became one of the most beloved American folk songs of the era, and an elegy for a landscape and a community erased by industrial mining.