Yesterday (May 18), this building was completely gutted by fire.
It’s latest label had been as an IGA, before Food City opened their downtown location on the former Kingsport Press property. The IGA closed shortly thereafter. Earlier, it had been a White’s Supermarket, but it had been built as Oakwood Market #2 in 1949 and was the first of the grocery stores to make up what would be known as Supermarket Row, along Canal Street. Wallace Boyd, Sr. had come into Kingsport from Kentucky and had opened the first Oakwood Market in Greenacres in 1947 (this is from a story in a 1947 issue of the Kingsport Times).
The store in Greenacres had an “exotic” canned food section that mom and I would drop by and snicker at. Chocolate-covered grasshoppers and snails and the like. But, like some of the things you see in antique stores, they hadn’t moved in years.
Btw, when Oakwood #2 was built, it had a waterfall on top. It was a triangular structure over the middle of the building. At the top of this, say, 20′ waterfall was the Oakwood sign, painted by Carter’s Art Shop (I used to know a guy who did some of the painting), and under it, on either side, was a continuously-cycling flow of water down a simulated rock waterfall. Most amazing. It is the nature of water to go anywhere there’s an opening, so I suspect that it leaked.
Our Mom worked as a bookkeeper there in the early to mid 50s, in the upstairs office overlooking the store. I remember riding there in my grandfather’s Studebaker to pick her up after work. While we waited for her, we’d listen to the “Br’er Rabbit” stories on the radio while I watched that waterfall with fascination. Of course, we shopped there every week, too.
That show was “Sleepy Joe”…it came to the station on big 78rpm records. Here’s a little bit of information on the Uncle Remus collection.
More than a year later, I know. Your reminding me about “Sleepy Joe” brought back even more fond memories of my first seven years with my grandparents. I’ve read elsewhere that the waterfall was actually a swamp cooler, at least for a time.
I knew a guy who worked for Carter’s Sign company when the “waterfall” was built. He didn’t, in my recollection (which is nearly 40 years old now), mention any practical use for the structure, but he was only working on the Oakwood sign. Given the state of the art of building cooling at that time, I think they would not have passed up a chance to use it for a evaporation cooler. Makes sense.