Tour Loretta Lynn’s Childhood Home

Loretta Lynn recently passed away at the age of 90. She will forever be remembered for her iconic and charged songs, like “Fist City”, “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)”, and “Don’t Come Home a’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)”. But, one of her most famous songs, which was also a book and a movie, was “Coal Miner’s Daughter”. This song tells of her humble upbringing in a cabin during the Great Depression, with her father’s meager wages from coal mining barely seeing the family through.

Instead of being paid an hourly wage or a yearly salary, he was only paid 25 cents for each ton of coal he shoveled by hand. Like other miners in the area he was paid in scrip instead of money, which could only be used to buy things from stores the coal company owned and operated. But, she said they had lots of love to go around and that her mother was understanding and didn’t complain about the hardships they went through as a family.

The house where she grew up in Butcher Hollow near Van Lear, Kentucky is still standing and the inside has been made into a museum called the Loretta Lynn Homeplace that you can wander through.

She was born in 1932 to Clara (“Clary”) and Theodore (“Ted”) Webb. The house where the family settled is built into a hill on a peaceful plot of land that’s both wooded and secluded. The only way up to the house in those days was a footpath as no one in the immediate area even had an automobile. In the book Coal Miner’s Daughter Lynn wrote that their first home had been very small and shoddy. She wrote that when the new home “had four rooms instead of one…we really thought we’d arrived.”

Some of the tours are given by one of Loretta Lynn’s nieces which means that there’s lot of family lore and little details sprinkled throughout the tour.

When Lynn used to come back to visit the cabin she would often sit and look out over the countryside from the front porch swing.

Inside the house much of the furniture pieces are ones that Lynn and her siblings grew up using. The big radio is where they listened to particular radio programs. But, they had to be selective since it ran on battery power as the area didn’t yet have electricity. So, they only listened to their very favorite shows.

The bed is covered in mementos and artifacts, including a family guitar that many of the 8 Webb children learned to play on. There are two beds on display downstairs and two bedrooms in the tiny upstairs area, the latter of which are not on display to the public.

In the kitchen are some moonshining items on display. There’s also a metal lunch bucket and miner’s hat with light very much like the ones Ted Webb would have taken with him to work each day. The original hat he wore is in the collection at the Loretta Lynn Ranch museum in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

Near the kitchen in this small house the family’s original pie safe and Hoosier cabinet still stand. It wasn’t until around the time that Lynn was herself married in the late 1940s that the holler got electricity and life became a little easier for the family.

You can see much more of the house, including some of the family’s photos, in the video tour below from the YouTube channel, Yankee in the South.