The story
Barthell was the first of eighteen coal camps built by the Stearns Coal & Lumber Company, opened in 1902 after a coal seam turned up during construction of the Kentucky & Tennessee Railroad. At its height it had 41 company houses, a busy company store, a school, a doctor's office, and the whole apparatus of company-town life in the Big South Fork country of McCreary County.
A destructive fire in 1943 began Barthell's decline, and the camp faded through the 1950s as the mines wound down — the common fate of the Stearns towns, of which the nearby Blue Heron is the best-known.
Barthell got a second life. In 1984 the Koger family bought the site and poured more than half a million dollars into restoring it, reopening in 1999 as an open-air museum of coal-camp life. The company store, doctor's office, schoolhouse, blacksmith shop, and fifteen restored miners' houses can be toured, and several of the houses are rented out for overnight stays.
What remains today
The restored company store, doctor's office, school and church, blacksmith shop, and fifteen renovated coal-camp houses, plus a mine tour.
Questions from the field
- Is Barthell a real ghost town or a reconstruction?
- Both — it was a genuine 1902 Stearns coal camp abandoned in the 1950s, then restored by the Koger family beginning in 1984 and reopened as an open-air museum in 1999.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Barthell — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Barthell's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 510422
- — Kentucky Coal Heritage — Barthell
- — Barthell Coal Camp historical records