Category Archives: Bob Lawrence Art

Cherokee Ice House

Cherokee Ice House was a long-time supplier of ice to homes and businesses in Kingsport. This is, I think (it is in a frame and I’m reluctant to take it apart), a wrapper for a bag of ice. A gallon of water weighs a little over 8 pounds, so this represents a gallon of ice, maybe. I don’t know from weighing ice…
This is what Cherokee Ice House looked like in 1977:

This drawing got me started on representing some of the buildings in and around downtown Kingsport. I did them in pencil, which gained me the comment, from a local art gallery, “Don’t you do anything in color?”.
Yes, I do, but I like doing buildings in black-and-white. Monochrome me.

I did a bit of research on this company. It appears to have been in business as early as 1922 (Kingsport Coal & Ice – they also made ice cream – began in 1917 on Main Street).
It was also known as “Cherokee Ice Plant, Old Kingsport”. Ice in the 1940’s was 60 cents per 100 pounds, 50 cents for commercial interests. There was a huge ice shortage in July of 1946. Ice had to be shipped in from as far away as Kentucky. Scott Roller owned Cherokee Ice in that year.

Lynn House

Taken probably in the late 70s.  This was Oak Hill Mansion, built sometime between 1815 and 1840 or so.  It was owned by the Lynn family, who were wealthy merchants and landowners (think “Lynn Garden”), who decamped to Knoxville in 1883.  In later times, this building was a private men’s club, hospital (the first public hospital in Kingsport, according to Muriel Spoden’s “Historic Sites in Sullivan County” ), a nightclub, and, for ages, an apartment building.  I drew this building in pencil back in the late 70s (I took this picture during the original photo shoot…the picture I took after climbing in a tree on the opposite side of the road was the one I used for my reference shot) (no, I climbed in the tree to get a better shot of the front of the building).  I put a vague suggestion of a person looking out of the upper left front window.  I was like that then…
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