Kingsport Spirit

This Friday, the Kingsport Dobyns-Bennett football team travels to Oak Ridge in a renewed rivalry that has been won 23 times by Kingsport and 22 times by Oak Ridge. But the connection is of global significance as the communities share a common heritage dating back to the Manhattan Project during World War II.

What Eastman did for the Manhattan Project (later “Oak Ridge”)

• The Manhattan Project was a top-secret U.S. effort during World War II to build the first atomic bombs before Nazi Germany did. It brought together scientists and industry to produce the atomic bombs used in 1945 to end the war with Japan.
• Because of Tennessee Eastman’s wartime production success at Kingsport (Holston Ordnance RDX, etc.), Gen. Leslie Groves tapped the company to operate Oak Ridge’s Y-12 electromagnetic‐separation plant. Tennessee Eastman managed Y-12 from January 1943 to May 1947 and transferred scientists and engineers from Kingsport to get it running. 
• During those years, the Y-12 workforce under Tennessee Eastman reached nearly 40,000 employees

Kingsport ↔ Oak Ridge: a genuinely symbiotic relationship

• Personnel & know-how flowed both ways. Eastman’s Kingsport talent base helped stand up Y-12 in 1943–45; after the war, Oak Ridge National Lab (Y-12/ORNL) remained a regional R&D anchor in East Tennessee, and Eastman continued to evolve and innovate in Kingsport.  
• Supply-chain & problem-solving ties persisted as Eastman kept expanding chemical capacity at Kingsport while Oak Ridge evolved from a wartime site into ORNL and the Y-12 National Security Complex. (Eastman’s own timeline still highlights its Y-12 leadership as a corporate milestone.) 

School colors: Oak Ridge borrowing from Kingsport

• When Oak Ridge High School was created in 1943, longtime AD Ben Martin picked “Wildcats” (his Kentucky lineage) and chose cardinal & gray “to emulate the successful programs at Dobyns-Bennett in Kingsport.” (D-B’s colors are maroon & gray.) 

Jim Welch, Hall of Fame award-winning teacher and former President of the Kingsport Board of Education said, “As the son of one of those post-WWII Oak Ridge transplants, it should be noted that the influx of those folks did much to transform Eastman and the city itself. The expansion of the research facilities at then Tennessee Eastman turned the company to being noted for its innovation as it was for its production. The side effects of that included expansion of the public library, the creation of a symphony orchestra, the transformation of Fordtown into Colonial Heights and the expansion of science and mathematics courses at Dobyns-Bennett High School. The diversity of the new arrivals also resulted in the building of Kingsport’s first Catholic Church and parochial school.”

I would only add that Jim is being modest. His father, also James M. Welch, spent more than 38 years at Tennessee Eastman before retiring in 1981. The classic Eastman-era executive poured his time and credibility back into the community. He didn’t just serve on boards—he steered them: past president of the ETSU Foundation, president of the Kingsport College Foundation, and a leader in the Kingsport Symphony Orchestra Association. ETSU named him an honorary alumnus and recognized him for “the greatest contribution to the Kingsport University Center,” a testament to how deliberately he advanced higher education access in Kingsport.

Welch’s civic résumé reads like a mid-century Kingsport who’s-who: Appalachian Council of the Arts, Kiwanis, life member of the Jaycees, Sullivan County chair for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes), and Tennessee statewide March of Dimes chair in 1956. Local honors followed—“Young Man of the Year” (1948) and the Kingsport Times-News award for community service (1967). The throughline is simple: when Eastman retirees often stepped into the volunteer engine room, Welch was already there turning the crank.

His name endures in the city’s higher-ed infrastructure. McCune-Welch Hall at ETSU at Kingsport anchors the Allandale campus, and the Kingsport College Foundation Jim & Elizabeth Welch Scholarship supports ETSU-at-Kingsport students—concrete artifacts of a strategy that married local industry, philanthropy, and university presence.

The younger Jim Welch started at eye level—with students. Over a 30-year career (1976–2006) in Kingsport City Schools, he taught social studies and American history and coached soccer. Colleagues tapped him for leadership (president, Kingsport Education Association; legislative chair, Tennessee Education Association; educator liaison to the State Board of Education). The state twice singled him out—Tennessee’s Outstanding Teacher for the Humanities (1998) and Outstanding Teacher of Social Studies (2002)—before KCS inducted him into its Hall of Fame. He later won a seat on the Kingsport Board of Education (2019–2023) and was elected board president in 2020.

Then he carried Kingsport’s safety-and-service ethic onto a global stage. For nearly two decades, Welch served as executive director of the Elizabeth R. Griffin Research Foundation (ERGRF), a Kingsport-rooted nonprofit formed after a tragic lab-acquired infection to improve biosafety and biosecurity worldwide. His work intersected with the National Institutes of Health training program and the international Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), where he helped convene and advise governments, NGOs, and research institutions. In 2018 he transitioned from ERGRF leadership and continued as an affiliate with the Elizabeth R. Griffin Program at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science & Security, which now carries that mission forward.

Taken together, the Welches map a two-generation arc that mirrors Kingsport itself. The father helped root higher education and cultural institutions in the city’s daily life. The son scaled local values to global relevance, strengthening safety norms in research and public health while investing back into the very school system that formed him. That is an uncommon symmetry—one man building the platforms that let people learn and serve, the other helping those people stay safe as their work reaches farther.

A real-life example of the symbiotic relationship of Kingsport and Oak Ridge.

Conclusion

The “Model City” and the “Atomic City” came of age together. Tennessee Eastman’s workforce and methods helped launch Oak Ridge’s Y-12 (1943–47), and the exchange of people and know-how never really stopped: ORNL/Y-12 became a permanent R&D anchor while Eastman kept expanding and partnering across the region. The ties show up in big ways—technology transfer, joint projects—and small ones, like school colors that nod to Dobyns-Bennett. On the gridiron, Oak Ridge and Dobyns-Bennett meet in a (mostly) friendly rivalry that underscores those links. Together, Kingsport and Oak Ridge make East Tennessee better–and it’s good to see the legacy continue.