Paradise Park: Muhlenberg County Heritage

On a short weekend drive through Muhlenberg County, KY, we discovered Paradise Park, a community spot in Powderly, between Central City and Greenville. It’s an outdoor museum, recreating a coal mining town from the first half of the 20th century, a tribute to the area’s mining and music heritage.

It was a chilly Sunday afternoon about a week before Christmas. In the center of the parking area is a farmers’ market, which the sign noted opens in April and is active through most of October. The skies were overcast, and there wasn’t a lot of activity, other than a few children and their parents milling into a restored schoolhouse to see Santa and Mrs. Claus. It was the Spring Ridge School, the oldest two-room schoolhouse in Kentucky, dating to 1935, and recently relocated to the park, where it was lovingly restored.

After we walked our dogs, Witney, Aubrey and Maddy, I got my camera bag out of the backseat and walked around the outdoor museum, which includes the boyhood home of country singer Merle Travis, which was relocated to the site from nearby Rosewood. I’m a long time fam of old country music, and recognized the name instantly. Travis may be best remembered for his classic song “Sixteen Tons,” about a coal miner, and life in and around the Rosewood coal mines. It was first released in 1947 by Capitol on Travis’s album “Folk Songs of the Hills.” The song became a gold record.

Travis’s boyhood home was a small, white frame house like many others still in use and lining the streets of small towns in Muhlenberg County. Another home relocated to the park is a shotgun home, so called because of it’s long and narrow build. A sign notes that it was A Duncan Mine home, which would have been rented to a miner and his family, typical of such operations. There would have been lines of these homes side by side to serve a workforce in a mining community.

It was a tough life for miners and there no way out for many, as the mine companies owned the homes and paid in their own scrip, which could be used only in their company stores, which offered staples and basic necessities, but little else. The United Mine Workers Union was eventually able to end the economic oppression and control. Company stores, mine owned housing and a scrip system of payment came to end, and working conditions, mine safety and collective bargaining became major concerns.

“You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store”
(From Merle Travis’ song Sixteen Tons)

As I walked along the paved path, I came across the Belton Mercantile Company, obviously an old company store. Ghost ads painted on the front of the building, barely readable, advertised Golden Leaf Flour, a staple that would have come in 25 pound bags, and was produced in mills at Owensboro, KY.

I ended my brief tour by walking across a wooden bridge to an old two room dogtrot log cabin, which remains unrestored. I put an ultrawide angle lens and external viewfinder on my digital rangefinder and snapped a few photos inside an out, and wandered back across the bridge and to the truck, shooting a nativity scene along the way.

I’ll be back this spring for the farmers’ market, and to shoot more photos of the outdoor museum when leaves fill the tree branches and provide shade along the narrow walkways. I wish more communities would develop historical themed parks like this one, which is both an educational experience and a tribute to the heritage of the county, with playgrounds for children, as well.