Blue Heron Art
This gracious creature has been and artist inspiration throughout history.
The Great Blue Heron is found throughout most of North America, from Alaska through Florida and down into Mexico and the Caribbean and even into South America.
Herons can be found in a range of fresh and salt water habitats, marshes, mangrove swamps, flooded meadows, lake edges, or shorelines, usually nesting in trees or bushes and always close to water.
Blue Heron Tennessee
The mining town of Blue Heron Tennessee is now a ghost town designated as a recreation area by the National Park Service..
Blue Heron, or Mine 18, is an abandoned coal mining town. It was a part of the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company’s past operation in what today is the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service. Most of what we know about life at Blue Heron, and the other Stearns coal towns, has been handed down through oral history. Blue Heron mine operated from 1937 until December 1962, when it closed. During that time, hundreds of people lived and worked in the isolated community on the banks of the Big South Fork River. Their story is the focus of this interpretive tour of the Blue Heron Community.
When the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company abandoned Blue Heron in 1962, the buildings were either removed or lapsed into decay. There were no original buildings standing when the town was “re-created” as an interpretive center in the 1980s. Consequently, the town was restored in an “open-air” museum format, and new structures were constructed on the approximate site of several of the original buildings. These new structures are open, metal shells of buildings, and are referred to as “ghost structures.” Each ghost structure has an audio-tape station with recorded recollections of some of the people of Mine 18.
The key to your experiencing Blue Heron is to see the town as it’s residents saw it. As you walk around this re-created town, listen to the words of the people of Blue Heron. They tell the story of their lives in this isolated mining community better than anyone.
Art
Come explore the artist world of the Blue Heron.