A couple million people last week heard about a community they had probably never heard of before: Henderson, Kentucky.
Henderson gained a rare mention on national television on Feb. 9 during an appearance by Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear on the late-night “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
Beshear was talking with Stewart about governance, politics and being a twice-elected Democratic governor in a decidedly red state.
“The one thing Democrats have to do is talk like normal human beings” and focus on “how are we working to better people’s lives,” Beshear said.
The governor then offered an illustration of doing that.
“There’s a town in Kentucky called Henderson,” Beshear said. “It’s a former coal-mining town. Hard times. It was moving to the right. I won by about 500 votes in 2019 and I thought it would be the last time ever” that he would carry Henderson County.
“Right before the 2023 election”—it was in mid-September, when Beshear was campaigning for re-election while being challenged by Republican Daniel Cameron—“we landed the cleanest, greenest recycled paper mill in the country—350 new jobs paying $40 an hour.”
“Solid,” Stewart remarked.
“And I’ll never forget it,” Beshear continued, “the owner of that facility”—Anthony Pratt, the chairman of Australia-based Pratt Industries, speaking at the dedication of the big recycling mill—“… said, ‘We’re creating 350’ — and then he used the term, in coal country—‘green jobs.’ You know what everybody did?”
“Boo?” Stewart speculated.
“No, they gave him a standing ovation, because they’re paying 40 bucks an hour,” Beshear said.
“I thought when you said ‘green,’ they’d say, ‘We’re leaving,’” Stewart said.
“Not if it’s helping you in your lives,” Beshear replied.
He went on to win Henderson County in the 2023 gubernatorial election by 1,459 votes—nearly three times as many as in 2019.
The governor’s remarks about a Henderson milestone reached a significant audience. “The Daily Show,” for years a skewer of political figures (particularly those on the right), has averaged 1 million nightly viewers so far this year, according to LateNighter.com—and the 17-minute Beshear-Stewart segment has been viewed more than 1.1 million times on YouTube.
One would be hard-pressed to recall a time when remarks about Henderson, Kentucky, were heard by some many people.
Henderson County Judge-Executive Brad Schneider, formerly the president of the chamber of commerce here, said the only time in recent memory that Henderson might have been mentioned on national television was following the shooting at the Atlantis Plastics plant in 2008 when a factory employee shot and killed five people and critically injured a sixth person before taking his own life.
“We may have made the national news, unfortunately” from that event, he said.
Beshear’s remarks about Pratt Paper coming to Henderson stands in stark contrast to that.
“I think anytime our community is mentioned (positively) in the national media, it’s a bright thing,” Schneider said. “It reminds me of how cool it was for Anthony Pratt, Mr. Pratt, to have taken out ads in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, bragging on the project in Henderson. I think that was fantastic. He did it more than once, (in) several ads.”
“To be given a positive shoutout, in the end, is a positive,” he said. “To be on national television is a thing.”
“My phone blew up that night, even the next day,” Missy Vanderpool, who as executive director of Henderson Economic Development led the effort to recruit Pratt Paper here, said Friday.
“I think people got excited about something we’ve done as a community to be recognized on national TV,” she said.
Beshear’s remarks do require some clarification, however.
It’s not quite accurate to refer to Henderson as “a former coal-mining town.” True, Henderson County has a long history of coal mining, and several coal companies (Mapco, Green Coal, Patriot Coal) operated mines here over the past half-century, though not all at the same time.
And yes, Henderson was for a few years the national headquarters of Peabody Coal Co. (though parent company Peabody Holding Inc. remain firmly based in St. Louis).
While coal mining provided good-paying jobs off and on here—including for Hendersonians who traveled to work at major mines in other counties—coal was never the underpinning of the Henderson economy as it was in eastern Kentucky communities such as Hazard and Pikeville or in western Kentucky’s Muhlenberg County.
Henderson, over the past few generations, relied far more on manufacturing (though Alliance Coal last year did open a new underground mine here employing some 300 people).
Nor was Henderson particularly experiencing “hard times”—the county’s unemployment rate of 4.0% in 2023 was below the state average.
Also, in fairness, the applause Anthony Pratt received in 2023 came not so much from former coal miners but from invited guests—elected officials, business leaders and mill employees—eager to celebrate the half-billion-dollar economic development milestone.
I clarify these things not to belittle Beshear’s recollection of events—he was correct in the spirit of these matters, if not the letter—but out of obligation as a journalist who spent years reporting on the rise and fall (and rise) of the coal industry in Henderson County as well as covering the Pratt Paper project.
But there can be little question that any Hendersonian watching “The Daily Show” that night—or seeing the video later on YouTube—sat up in their seat and, in some fashion, pointed at their screen and exclaimed, “He’s talking about our town!”
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The portion of Beshear’s remarks about Henderson on “The Daily Show” can be viewed here.
Beshear’s entire 17-minute appearance can be viewed here.
