Category: History
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Exchange Place: Kingsport’s “Movie Set” With a Real Backstory
This weekend, Exchange Place will be abuzz for the Fall Folk Arts Festival. If you’ve never been, you should consider it. As you drive along Orebank Road through some of Kingsport’s most desirable neighborhoods, a cluster of cabins and buildings suddenly appears like a movie set on the eastern end of the Kingsport Greenbelt. There…
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We Always Rise to the Occasion During Difficult Times
Have you ever thought about the difference between a city and a community? A city is a legally defined, structured entity with the authority to enforce laws. It operates under a charter, with elected officials and public services focused on managing resources and the well-being of its residents. A city has taxing authority. And if…
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Kingsport & Oak Ridge
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…
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Appalachian Poverty: Bad Data, Good Intentions
Recently, we published an article titled “Safer by Design, Not by Statistics” that shows why Tennessee’s crime rate isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison with other places—and how it’s often misused to suggest we’re less safe than we really are. You can read it at KingsportSpirit.com. Another misleading statistic is the poverty rate. Appalachia is “poorer” than…
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Kingsport might have been named Peltier or Horace
Today, we tend to skip the first 156 years and focus on Kingsport as the 1917 Model City with landmarks like Church Circle, Broad Street, and the Train Station. But early developers only repurposed the name of a previously incorporated town, an actual port on the river that had lost its charter after the Civil…
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Kingsport-On-The-Holston
Rarely do we hear of Kingsport referred to as ‘ancient’. Instead, our Centennial Park downtown celebrates the city’s 100th anniversary in 2017; however, this article from a Knoxville newspaper was published in 1889. Kingsport was settled in 1761 and was first officially incorporated in 1822 as a riverport. The ‘model city’ we know today was…
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Great Mass Meeting of Tennesseans and Virginians at Kingsport
FORTY THOUSAND PERSONS PRESENT—ENTHUSIASM OF THE DEMOCRACY—EAST TENNESSEE SAFE FOR POLK AND DALLAS I enjoy digging into old newspaper articles, and this snippet from the 1844 Nashville Union is a real treasure. We often assume Kingsport only began in 1917, but for 156 years before that it was a bustling river port—the highest navigable point…
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The First Steamboat at Kingsport
Transcribed by AI from the 1847 Knoxville Register (14 years prior to the Civil War) “To the CASSANDRA, owned by the Messrs. Deerys & Churchwell, and commanded by Capt. Chapman, belongs the honor of having first succeeded in reaching Kingsport, the highest point on the Holston by many miles to which a steamboat has ever…
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Kingsport’s Potential Noted…in 1876
Today we think of Kingsport as the Model City incorporated in 1917. But there was a previous town incorporated in 1822 that we often overlook in history. It’s interesting to see newspaper articles published two generations before Northern industrialists arrived on the scene to build the city we know today. The time period was 1876–slightly…
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1902 – Centenarian’s View of Living in Kingsport Since 1822
From the 1902 Knoxville Journal… History is typically read in textbooks, but this is a unique, personal point of view of someone who lived it. She lived in Kingsport before, during, and after the Civil War! Keep in mind when she says ‘downtown district’ that it doesn’t mean the one we know, it means the…
Kingsport Spirit 