This card is called a GRTS, an abbreviation for Greetings.
The card was published by Blackburn News Agency, but it was printed by Curt Teich in Chicago in 1951 (there’s a list of inventory numbers/years on the web). If you look closely, two of the images shown in the big letters are not even Kingsport. The picture behind the “K” has to be Chickamauga Dam and the bridge behind the “O” looks like one down on Cherokee Lake.
“K.24 BRIDGE OVER HOLSTON RIVER ON U.S. 23, BETWEEN KINGSPORT AND JOHNSON CITY, TENN”
Verso: He (unreadable) Since I didn’t send that card from Knoxville I promised you, I will send you one today as we are in Johnson City having a swell time. Marie
Mailed to Miss (?Nepall?) Rader, Route 2, Greeneville, Tenn.
PM: Johnson City August 10, 1945.
Work didn’t begin on Ft. Patrick Henry Dam until six years later. The person who took this picture was probably in a boat or had water wings on or something. This is looking south, more or less.
“A BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF KINGSPORT, TENN., FROM “THE CEMENT HILL”
This postcard is interesting for several reasons, the first being that it was actually used, so there’s a postmark on the back. It was mailed in 1931 from Kingsport by a couple passing through on the way to Knoxville and addressed to a lady in Reidsville North Carolina, R.F.D. #6.
It’s also a reasonably scarce issue by T.J. Stephenson of Kingsport (he took the picture) and printed by Tichenor Dual Views (Tichenor Brothers of Cambridge MA), plate #121031. You don’t have to look very carefully to see that it is a black & white photograph that’s been rather crudely colored in by the publisher. Stephenson had a whole line of postcards with pictures of Kingsport taken in the mid- to late-20s. I love these cards and don’t have all in the series. I saw one of Catawba Street that I so badly wanted to snatch out of the owner’s hand and sprint off with, but, sadly, I didn’t.
Bob Lawrence's Kingsport 