Stearns, Kentucky: The Last Lumber Baron's Company Town

Stearns, Kentucky, was founded in the early nineteen hundreds by Justus Stearns, one of the last great lumber barons of the Great Lakes region, who bought a vast tract of virgin forest in McCreary County. When workers clearing land for a railway discovered coal seams, his lumber company became the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company, eventually controlling a vast part of southern Kentucky. The company built not just mines but an entire world: the Kentucky and Tennessee Railway, a large sawmill, many coal and lumber camps, and housing and recreation for its workers.

When the coal economy collapsed, so did Stearns. Today the town is the boarding point for the Big South Fork Scenic Railway, a sixteen-mile round trip into the gorge, passing the ghost structures of Blue Heron, Mine Eighteen, preserved in open steel shells where the original buildings once stood.