My buddy, He Who Finds Stuff Where I’ve Already Looked, dug this deck of cards up at an estate sale. The box is pretty worn and the cards have been played a lot, but it’s still in fairly good shape. Judging from the Joker design, the deck was made by Cartamundi, which had a presence in Kingsport from 1996 to 2007.
Four books and a pamphlet about Kingsport: (l to r) Kingsport: A Romance of Industry, by Howard Long. 1928 (Sevier Press); the Rotary Club 1937 green book of Kingsport with forward by J. Fred Johnson; the Rotary Club 1946 blue book of Kingsport with forward by C.P. Edwards, Jr.; the Rotary Club 1951 beige book of Kingsport with forward by William F. Freehoff, Jr.; and The Early Years on Bays Mountain, by Muriel Millar Clark Spoden. 1975 (privately printed). Except for the pamphlet on Bays Mountain history, these books are quite similar, most taking their lead from the Long book.
In my opinion, the best book about modern Kingsport’s history is Margaret Ripley Wolfe’s “Kingsport Tennessee A Planned American City” (1987, University of Kentucky Press), which I’ve commented on before.
Since this building has been in the news lately, here’s what it looked like in its heyday, in the 1930s.
Here we are looking east down the 900 block of Watauga. It’s around 1934 or so. This is a T.J. Stephenson commissioned card printed by Tichnor Brothers. It appears a little faded, but it’s not. This was done before Tichnor introduced the embossing (linen pattern) roller into the printing process which supported more vivid colors.
In 1930, as the Nation slowly eased into the Great Depression, a group of Kingsport rainmakers gathered to form a new institution: Kingsport Federal Building and Savings Association (Wolfe, Margaret Ripley. Kingsport Tennessee A Planned American City. University of Kentucky Press 1987). The bank became Heritage Federal late in 1978 and folded its tents in 1995.
This was the location of Kingsport’s B. F. Goodrich store in the 1940s (it’s now Anchor Antiques). B. F. Goodrich was a very early company to put rubber on the road.
When I was a kid, B. F. Goodrich was on the corner of New and Cherokee Streets, 324 Cherokee, the former home of Kroger. I bought my Schwinn bike there after my second-hand English bike rattled its last transmission.
I have posted before on the Downtowner Motor Inn but I recently ran across this matchbook listing the amenities of this place, corner of Center and Shelby Street.
It went up in 1960 and lasted under various names (“Port o’ Kings”, “Motor Inn”, Kingsport Inn”) before being demolished in the early 90s
This rather shopworn ice scraper was issued sometime before 1995, when the North American Numbering System assigned the area code of 423 to parts of East Tennessee (Tennessee had originally been assigned 901 in 1947, then in 1954, 901 went to West Tennessee and the rest of us Volunteers had to make do with 615). Old 247 prefix was CIrcle-7.
If you can’t find a pen when you need one, don’t blame the advertising specialty companies!
Kingsport used to have several, individually owned book stores, like this one:
Bob Lawrence's Kingsport 