The fieldstone lodge that anchors the park is named for Jesse Hilton Stuart (1906-1984), the Greenup County native who became Kentucky's Poet Laureate and one of America's most prolific writers of rural fiction and poetry. Stuart wrote more than 2,000 poems and 460 short stories drawn from these hills, often set in the W-Hollow farm where he grew up. The lodge reading room holds his books and personal mementos, an unusual literary memorial inside what is otherwise a fairly standard mid-twentieth-century state park lodge. Thirty-six rooms, most with private patios or balconies overlooking the lake, give guests the kind of view Stuart spent his life describing. The dining room seats 232. Anglers Cove Restaurant within the lodge is known regionally for its catfish dinners.

Greenbo Lake covers 300 acres of impounded water - though older park literature sometimes lists it at 225 acres, the difference depending on pool level. What is not in dispute is the fishing. The lake has produced two state-record largemouth bass, a remarkable achievement for an inland impoundment in Kentucky. Bluegill, crappie, catfish, and trout round out the catch. A boat dock and marina at the lake's eastern end provide rentals and access, and the park keeps the operation reasonably priced for working-family use. The 1948 fishing trip that started everything was, in this respect, vindicated. The men who imagined a better fishing hole got one - and then some.

Over 25 miles of trails wind through the Greenbo forest, ranging from easy nature walks to genuinely difficult ridge climbs. Some are open to mountain bikes and horses as well as hikers. The terrain is classic eastern Kentucky - oak and hickory ridges, hemlock-shaded coves, sandstone outcrops where moisture seeps. This is the country Jesse Stuart wrote about. Walking the trails here is a way of seeing the landscape his prose took for granted. The forest is largely second-growth, the original timber having been cut over a century ago for the coal-mining industry and for railroad ties. What grew back is the working second-growth Appalachian forest, beautiful in its own right and rich in wildlife - deer, wild turkey, the occasional bobcat, and birds enough to keep an attentive visitor happy for days.

The campground holds 63 utility sites and 35 primitive sites, with two dump stations and two central service buildings for showers and restrooms. A grocery store on site means you do not have to leave the park for basic supplies. The swimming pool features water slides for the kids. Two tennis courts and an 18-hole miniature golf course handle the recreation needs that the lake itself does not satisfy. The amphitheater hosts music festivals and other events through the summer. The camping season runs from mid-March to mid-November, with the heart of the summer being the busiest time - families from Ashland, Huntington, and the surrounding tri-state area, drawn by inexpensive lodging and water close to home.

The park sits west of Greenup on Kentucky State Route 1, in the rolling hills between the Ohio River and the deeper Eastern Coalfield. From the air, Greenbo Lake reads as a thin curved blue stripe surrounded by densely wooded ridges - one of the relatively few large bodies of water in this corner of the state. The lodge complex on the southern shore is visible as a cluster of buildings around an open area. Fall color in October is spectacular, with hardwood ridges turning yellow, orange, and red against the lake's reflection. This is one of the easier Kentucky state parks to spot from a small plane on a clear day, especially with the lake's irregular shoreline tracing the contours of the old creek valley underneath.