I saw this going in on Sunday afternoon and, for a moment, I felt a faint quiver of excitement, then I remembered that the City was having a Google enterprise workshop on Monday (8/13/18). That’s what the people in the background are doing: loading in chairs for the event. Anyway, it was kind of different, though.
Before the likes of George Carter and J. Fred Johnson strode the land, the area now hosting downtown Kingsport was a wetland, a marsh, a swamp. A good place for hunting rabbits, it’s said.
Not a particularly good place to site a new town, so, two ditches were dug, one to the west and one to the east, to escort the water out of the downtown basin and off to somewhere else.
So here is Canal Street. It’s actually a cut-and-cover culvert: the western ditch. It comes out here:
This is on Reedy Creek, next to the old Irpco (sounds kind of like a burp, no?), which, in memory, is the old Coca-Cola bottling company on West Sullivan Street.
Bob Lawrence's Kingsport 