.png)
By Grant Avis
.jpg)
Over the summer, I traveled to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River, where the little town of Paradise once lay. As part of my endeavor to visit all 120 of Kentucky’s counties, my visit to Muhlenberg was heavily influenced by a song my grandfather sang to me when I was a child: John Prine’s Paradise. At the TVA plant in eastern Muhlenberg County, I found unnerving abandoned smokestacks, dusty roads, and the complicated legacy of Old King Coal.
As I entered Muhlenberg from neighboring Butler County, John Prine Memorial Park sat along the roadside. Passing it at first, not previously knowing it was there, I turned my little car around onto Route 70. The sun had beat the blacktop into that familiar faded gray, and the gravel in the park’s parking lot had washed out, leaving gulleys that led people down to the Green River. These people, the past visitors, had left Mountain Dew bottles and cigarette buts galore. As I stumbled on the rocks lining the river bank, I realized I was looking at the Rochester Dam. Here’s where John Prine asked in his song for his soul to roll on up to. I was sorry for him then, sorry that his soul’s desired resting place had been, in my mind, desecrated, and sorry that his beloved Paradise had been destroyed, and sorry for the fish that had to swim next to the plastic as they jumped over the foam that rose out of where water met water at the dam. I was further sorry for the community of Paradise and the land around it that had been brutally “tortured” and “stripped” and “forsaken” all for “the progress of man.” Wretched destruction, I thought then.
I drove the car out of that resting place of used cigarettes and at least one soul back toward the real destination: Paradise. The faded asphalt of the state highway soon turned into the hardly paved asphalt of the county road, which then naturally gave way to the gravel road maintained by Lord knows who. Apple Maps directed my little car, with its peculiar green paint turned gray by the dust, deeper into the woods and further down unpaved roads, far beyond what so-called civilized people call civilization. After a little while of wondering when to turn around, I saw something the civilized people would be quite satisfied with - poles and wires and finally giant, gray smokestacks standing tall against the cloudy skies. Everything there was gray: the gravel, the sky, and the massive complex of concrete. No gray smoke came from those mighty towers, though. They were thinner than I expected. I thought again of discarded cigarettes. I couldn’t see the river, though the map told me it was just on the other side of those snuffed cigarettes. The power plant was much larger than I expected. A massive goliath of tubes, wires, and miscellaneous industrial terms towered over me. And all of it was completely silent. It was one of the creepiest experiences of my life. I was nearly completely alone in the midst of a quieted industrial giant. At any moment, I expected it to spring to life and swallow me whole. I hoped it would, just to cure the eerie feeling that possessed me. Eventually, I decided to leave. Finding blacktop, and then grass alongside the blacktop, my car darted out of there. But the fields around there were not like what I was used to in Kentucky. There was only grass - no livestock, no crops, few trees, scant life. The sign I missed by creeping in across gravel roads welcomed me in the rearview mirror. Turning around again, I went to observe the sign. The once blue letter had faded, and entirely fallen away in some places, to blend in with the gray concrete slab that, in a font rarely used since the 1960s, announced where I was: Paradise. The beautiful little town along the Green River that John Prine nostalgically sang about was now that - an expanse of a sleeping, or dead, industrial giant surrounded by barren fields. And everything was gray. All gray. Wretched destruction, I thought again.
Traveling through barren fields for some time, I saw no other vehicles, whether on the road or the railroad track beside me. But most roads do in fact go somewhere, and my little car found some company as we got closer to town and further from Paradise. After extensive wandering around, refreshing my memory of what it was like to see people’s faces in passing cars and blurred stalks of corn in fields, I happened upon a sort of museum. Alongside the highway saw a model of a real, old-fashioned company town. I checked it out as rain began to fall, the gray clouds that had clogged the sky all day finally releasing their relief on the cracked dirt in what had been a particularly dry summer. After contenting myself with the general store, union hall, and school, I stepped into a little shotgun house. To my surprise, three people sat waiting for me. They were even more surprised that the little exhibit had visitors, especially young ones. They soon educated me that I was standing in the National Thumbpickers Hall of Fame, and I began one of the most interesting conversations of my life.
Larry was a retired coal miner. He was born and raised in Muhlenberg County, just like his father and his father’s father and probably further back. Probably around 75 when I met him that day, the skin on his bald head was sprinkled with sunspots. A scraggly, white mustache rested on his face - the only thing about him that seemed to have rested. His facial hair was of the old style, thick and hanging down well past the sides of his lips. He something like Otto von Bismarck, if the chancellor had known many days of hard work. He remembered Paradise. But his memory was far from what I expected.
“Paradise was a crappy little town,” Larry told me. “Wudn’t nothin’ there.” I’m sure Larry saw my surprise at his answer to my question about the destruction of the little town and John Prine’s legendary. “Oh, the folks down there were happy to leave. Everyone was poor as dirt. They got paid. And they got out.” To Larry, getting out of Paradise was a privilege.
“And John Prine - that boy wudn’t from here anyway. His parents was from here. He was singin’ bout something he didn’t know a thing about.”
Steve was younger than Larry. He still worked for the TVA, which ran the Paradise Plant. The signs of age and work could not be found on him. “That power plant put Muhlenberg County on the map,” Steve told me. “It brought jobs, business, money.” He paused. “But a lot of that’s gone now.”
The eerie sleeping giant I have witnessed had been shuttered gradually between 2017 and 2020. Steve got to keep his job with the TVA, but not in Muhlenberg County. He had to travel hours away in Kentucky and Tennessee to provide support to other plants.
“Closing that plant hurt this area hard. Lot of people had to move if they wanted to keep their jobs with TVA. Just fueled the anger people have. They blamed Obama, thought Trump would save us. But the plant still closed. It was pure business, and business just ain’t good for around here.” We sat with that for a while. I thought of all the casualties in my life to “pure business” and the mighty economy.
“And about John Prine,” Steve began, likely wanting a distraction from that feeling of helplessness against the forces that determine our lives. “He ain’t our guy.” Steve led me to a nearby building - the Merle Travis Music Center. He was the Muhlenberg County musician they venerated. Yet, Merle Travis wrote another famous song about coal mining: Sixteen Tons. Like John Prine’s Paradise, it is critical of coal mining, lamenting how the industry further impoverished miners. How could a TVA man and a coal miner glorify that?
“Well yeah, but was actually a miner. And he grew up around here,” Steve replied. The ultimate rite of passage in a small town comes at birth.
We talked a long while, about coal, dirty coal, clean coal, politics, presidents, governors, mining, powering, fiddling, picking, withering. And the conversation opened my mind. According to them, Paradise was glad to be gone. The tragedy occurred not when the plant was built, but when it closed. Where I had seen wretched destruction, they saw opportunity. Where John Prine had seen Paradise, they saw
But where was that opportunity? If Old King Coal had provided, he didn’t provide for long. Now, lives were being upended again, just like the coal plant had upended the farming communities around Paradise. Those farms can’t come back now, and I highly doubt coal will, even if Willie Stark assures us of it. A lot of folks aren’t coming back either.
I found out Larry was one of them. He retired from the mine early. Didn’t want his kids growing up around there. He and his wife got a job in Lexington. They moved to the suburbs. It was getting hard for Steve to stay in Muhlenberg County too, with his hours-long work trips every day. Now, Larry’s kids wouldn’t meet his standard to write a song about Muhlenberg County. I wondered if Steve’s kids or grandkids would meet the standard. What would be left for them? Would they stay? And how in the world could you convince them?
Grant Avis is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2026. He is studying history and political science at the University of Louisville.