Throwback Thursday: New Scotland and the Haunted Airdrie Ironworks
Along the banks of the Green River, hidden beneath generations of overgrowth, stand the crumbling remains of a forgotten place, a ghost town. Just in time for Halloween weekend, let’s visit what looks like a medieval castle in the middle of Muhlenberg County.
Its buildings have been abandoned for more than a century, and its ancient stonework dates from over 170 years ago. According to local legend, some of its former residents never left. This Halloween, Throwback Thursday takes us where the ghosts of old Airdrie are said to haunt the ruins of a once-promising “New Scotland” settlement.
The story begins in 1855, when Scottish industrialist Sir Robert Alexander envisioned building a thriving ironmaking community along the Green River. He named it Airdrie, after his family’s Scottish home. Alexander brought experienced Scottish ironworkers and their families to Kentucky, constructing a massive furnace, machinery house, hotel, and village overlooking the river. Among the Scottish families who settled here were the Cleneys, McLeans, Hendries, Allens, Duncans, Alexanders, Sutherlands, and McConnells.
The dream, though, quickly unraveled. The Scottish workers discovered that Kentucky’s iron ore required different treatment from the ore they knew back home. Despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, the furnace never produced commercially successful iron. By 1857, the operation was abandoned.
Following the Civil War, another famous figure attempted to revive Airdrie. Union General Don Carlos Buell, who had commanded troops at the Battle of Perryville, acquired the property in 1866. Buell envisioned an industrial community supported by the region’s coal and iron deposits. But transportation difficulties along the Green River helped defeat those ambitions, too. Buell spent his remaining decades at Airdrie, dying there in 1898. As the community disappeared, its reputation grew considerably darker.
In February 1949, the Central City Messenger published an article declaring that only ghosts inhabited old Airdrie. Local legends told of Civil War prisoners confined within the stone structures. One particularly gruesome story claimed a prisoner had been thrown into the furnace and burned alive. Others described the sounds of heavy chains dragging across stone steps. The most chilling tale involved a young woman murdered inside Airdrie’s old hotel. According to folklore, robbers killed the traveler as she slept, severed her head, and threw it into the fire. For years afterward, residents claimed to see her headless apparition wandering the abandoned settlement.
If Airdrie sounds familiar, you may have heard it mentioned in John Prine’s song Paradise. Though born in Illinois, Prine’s parents were from Muhlenberg County, and the young songwriter spent time on Airdrie Hill. In his elegy for the nearby town of Paradise which was erased from the maps by strip mining, Prine calls the building next to the furnace an “abandoned old prison,” harkening back to the legends of it being used to house Civil War prisoners. Today, the McDougall Cemetery is the only thing left of Paradise.
Whether the Airdrie ghost stories were true, or simply legends inspired by the settlement’s eerie remains, no one can say for certain. Over 170 years after Airdrie’s founding, the remains of its once-grand furnace still stand as reminders of a Scottish dream that never came to life. Perhaps the most haunting part of Airdrie isn’t what people claimed to see there. It’s the community that just … disappeared.
