Tag: History
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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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Different by Design: Why Downtown Kingsport Streets Feel Safer
Second in a Series Safety isn’t just about statistics. It’s also about how a place feels when you walk its downtown streets, drive its roads, or raise your family there. Kingsport’s long history of thoughtful planning has created a city that feels safe by design, not just by numbers. When Kingsport was incorporated in 1917,…
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Safer by Design, Not by Statistics
First in a Series When you search for crime rates in Tennessee, the numbers can seem surprising. Cities like Kingsport often appear “less safe” on paper than they feel in real life. But here’s the truth: Tennessee has been holding itself to a higher standard of honesty for decades, which makes the numbers look inflated…
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From the Tristar to the Tri-Cities: Discovering Tennessee
Tennessee is a wonderful state with many positive tax and quality-of-life advantages. The state constitution divides it into three grand divisions–East, Middle, and West from the Mighty Mississippi to the Great Smoky Mountains. That’s what our rare, bold, and elegantly simple red Tristar flag stands for. The blue circle symbolizes the eternal bond and unity…
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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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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 