To See Ourselves As Others See Us

In the spring of 1951 the Rochester Times-Union sent a reporter to Kingsport to report back about what Rochesterians considered their satellite city. What he found was not an Eastman company town but a planned city with a diversity of industries.
The Kingsport Times reprinted that story on Tuesday April 10, 1951.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

BY ANDREW WOLFE

Times-Union Staff Writer

Kingsport, Tenn, -- There's a touch of Texas in the city of Kingsport, the "city planner's dream job."

Its booming businesses, youthful unfinished look and its super-abundant energy make you think of Dallas or Houston.

But that's only part of the Kingsport story. Everywhere you feel also the far-sighted artistry of expert city planners, the influence of ultra-progressive business management, and the astonishing spirit of the pioneer people who have lived in the surrounding Appalachian Highlands since the Revolution.

Forty years ago Kingsport was hardly more than a wide place in the road in the extreme northeast section of Tennessee. Today it's a city of nearly 20,000, the center of an industrial community of 55,000. And it makes you believe that for tomorrow its horizon is limitless.

Already, in the Tennessee Eastman Company Kingsport has the largest Industrial plant in the state. But It also has the largest book manufacturing plant in the world, and the largest gunpowder factory.

In the flat lands along the south branch of the Holston River, areas set aside 34 years ago for industrial development, you see the carefully-planned complexities of the Eastman plant-more than 100 buildings covering nearly 400 acres. Nearby are other factories,shiny-fronted stores cluster on the broad streets of the business district, and businessmen will tell you enthusiastically of plans for buildings to fill the vacant lots which gape here and there. Four brick churches with| slender Georgian spires, grouped in a semi-circle, give a special character to the civic center they face.

And on the nearby hills, just as the city plan of 1917 ordained, modern homes have sprung up on large, tree-shaded lots in a carefully-designed "livings groups."

Man has done his utmost, you feel to make Kingsport a beautiful, liveable community.

And so has Nature. No matter in what direction you face, superb mountain scenery fills in a dramatic and beautiful background. To the east looms the storied barrier of the Blue Ridge, to the north the rugged Clinch Mountains, to the west the gaunt spine of the Cumberlands. And to the south and southwest the jutting, forested bulks of Bays Mountain and Chimney Top stretch of toward the Great Smokies,

Those who have seen these southern mountains in the Spring when the dogwood and rhododendron are in bloom are quite ready to say that in physical beauties, this “planned community" has few competitors in all the world. And its upland climate also is hard to beat.

Nevertheless, the most fascinating chapters of the Kingsport story deal with its people, and the way they have made the swift transition from their old highland ways to modern industrial life.

"Come go home," is one of the things an East Tennessean may say when he leaves a friend. It's his way of saying his home is always open to friends and, more, of asserting the bond of friendship

And the reply is: "You 'uns come," meaning, "no, you come to us."

To those who don't know any better, that's hill-billy talk. But to those who know the East Tennessee hill folk, the simple phrases express the highlanders' solid, four-square way of doing things, and their deep-dwelling courtesy.

Industrialism came to these people later than it did to residents of many other sections of the United States, but they've come along very last to form an Industrial society that's pretty much a class by itself. They long ago proved their ability as soldiers, and their craftsmanship and musicality are famous. But businessmen who come to Kingsport are more apt to talk about their remarkable industrial skills.

They haven't built Kingsport on their own in one generation, but they've contributed mightily and more than justified the confidence placed in them 40 years ago by the developers of modern Kingsport.

Actually Kingsport was founded in 1761, which may come as a surprise to Rochesterians accustomed to thinking of Kingsport as the city Eastman Kodak "helped to found." Daniel Boone and scores of other frontiersmen knew well the tiny settlement on the Holston. And in the Civil War, a small battle was fought near Kingsport whose anti-slavery people were largely Unionists in sentiment and remain to this day an island of Republicanism in the "solidly" Democratic South.

But the community had only a few hundred inhabitants until a New York City financier, John Dennis, created what is now the Clinchfield Railroad. Dennis saw that a successful community in the area would help his railroad prosper, and he took steps to create one.

Fortunately, Dennis was a man of high ideals - not a "gouge and run" real estate promoter. With the late J. Fred Johnson, "the father of modern Kingsport" serving as his agent, Dennis set out to build a model planned community, Johnson, a merchant who had been born in the area, was to devote most of the remainder of his life to seeing that Dennis' dream came true.

They started operations about the time of the completion of the railroad in 1909, but it wasn't until about 1917 that the project really got rolling. In that year: Dr. John Nolen of Cambridge, Mass., a noted city planner, finished a plan for the city which has been adhered to in general ever since.

Kingsport was incorporated with a non-partisan city manager form of government designed at Dennis' request by the Bureau of Municipal Research of the Rockefeller Foundation. It was the first manager government in Tennessee.

Then Johnson set out to get factories built in what was labeled "Industrial section” on Nolen's plan, but was in reality e only wide-stretching meadows beside the Holston. In World War I he succeeded in having wood alcohol and leather factories built, but they were abandoned when the conflict ended. Nothing daunted, Johnson kept working, always taking care that the companies he invited to come to Kingsport were  organizations run by men of character.

In 1920 he succeeded in selling George Eastman and the late Frank Lovejoy on the idea of using the alcohol plant as a source of wood alcohol for the kind of photographic film then in use. There is a folk story that East man approved the venture when a small hill boy told him: "Please, mister, you bring your factory here and we'll run it for you." In any case the Kodak founder chose well, and from a small factory employing a few hundred has grown the large factory of today. Perhaps 150 of as those who work at TEC are”'transplants" from the Flower city [Rochester].

But Rochesterians should not get the idea that Kingsport is a one-factory town since only about 8,000 of the city's 20,000 "gainfully employed” work at Tennessee Eastman. Many other businesses have been lured there by the city's central location, community spirit and top-notch labor market.

Into the abandoned leather factory in 1922 came the Kingsport Press, Inc. It started out to produce cheap reprints of children's classics. But under the leadership of Col. Elbridge Palmer, a short, super-energetic native of New Hampshire with blue eyes and frosty white eyebrows, the factory has grown into the largest complete book manufacturing plant in the world.

Here, hundreds of miles from the East Coast publishing centers, are the presses which print a large share of the tremendous Book-of-the-Month Club editions, encyclopedias, textbooks, Bibles, anthologies, fiction bestsellers and all other types of books at rate of a million and a half copies a month. About 1,200 people work at the Press, many of them printers of the highest craftsmanship. Another thousand men and women work at the massive rectangular brick structure of the Borden Mills, Inc. One of the largest cotton cloth factories in the South, the factory was moved here lock, stock and barrel from Fall River, Mass., starting in 1924. Other major industries include a subsidiary of the Corning Gas ne Works, a cement plant, a major foundry, a factory manufacturing power transmission equipment, a paper factory, a plant for manufacture of book bindings, a hosiery mill, a large brickworks - and last but not least the Holston Ordnance Works.

This giant plant for making RDX, the super-explosive, is a few miles northwest of Kingsport, in the flat land on a wide bend of the Holston River. Its construction in less than a year was one of the great engineering triumphs of World War II, a triumph for which major credit goes to Tennessee Eastman which designed and operated it. At peak operation more than 5,000 people were employed in making RDX, which out-TNT'S TNT, and composition B, an explosive of which RDX is a major component. On a stand-by basis since 1945, the plant is now back in production. Again RDX is being piled in concrete-and-turf igloo-like storage buildings at foot of Bays Mountain.

Commanding the works now is a former Rochesterian, Col. William E. Ryan, West Point Class of 1920 and an uncle of Jimmy Ryan, Aquinas and Yale football star.

More than 90 per cent of those who work in these factories are of the old mountain stock, mostly Scotch-Irish and some Pennsylvania Dutch who came down the Appalachians to Tennessee in the latter part of the 18^th century. Although forced by the starkness of the land to live in more or less primitive fashion, they were and are what writer Donald Culross Peattie has called "some of the most gifted and courageous and interesting people to live in this country. Given the opportunity, they quickly proved admirable workers. And they took with sureness and firmness the great step from their hill country life into modern Industrialism.”

But it's more accurate to say they combined the two, for they have retained much that is meaningful of their earlier way of life.

Take John Harr, for example. Tall, powerfully-built, but with a gentle, courteous manner, he's a foreman at "the Eastman." He lives with his wife and two children in a neat, white-painted bungalow on Old Stage Road along a ridge just outside Kingsport from which there is a magnificent view of the Holston Valley and the mountains.

Hart has worked for Eastman 17 years, and makes good wages. But it is typical of the East Tennessee hill folk that although he has bought his wife, Bonnie, every sort of kitchen appliance, he still raises most of his own vegetables and most of his own meat.

Were Kingsport’s factories to disappear tomorrow. Harr could "make out" just as his forebears "made out" for a century and a fore, that the biggest bankroll couldn't give.

And he knows that in a pinch he can depend on his family and friends to aid him, just as he would aid them if needed, since the old Scottish clan spirit is still strong.

There's still a spirit of pioneer neighborliness, too. Many of Hart's neighbors are scientists, who came from away." (In fact, Old Stage Road is now dubbed "scientists' row.") But Harr is as ready to help them as he is to aid any of his numerous cousins living up the road in what is locally known as Harrtown.

Another example of what the Kingsport people are like is Charles Bacon. He, too, works at "the Eastman," but he hasn't moved into town. Instead, he lives in a home he built with his father-in-law's help atop wooded knoll on his father-in-law's farm, His pretty wife explains the love of the land which has kept them from moving into Kingsport or to some other city:

"We've been away to places like Florida, but I always want to get home. I like the hills. They mean something to you if you were brought up in them. Families like the Harrs and the Bacons with the aid of the public-spirited industries are what have built Kingsport. The community spirit is remarkable. A Community Chest drive has never failed its goal, nor has a Red Cross drive. Hundreds of people turn out for the meetings at which the city's business is discussed, and thousands jam the municipal stadium to watch is the generally outstanding Dobyns-Bennett High School football teams in action. The modern stadium, seating 7,000 for football, is a feature of a park-like recreation area, which also includes a large swimming pool and an auditorium completed in in 1939, which seats 1,200.

Indifference is a quality of dubious value in Kingsport. You're expected to take part in civic affairs and most everybody does. As you enter the city there is a long line of signs telling the visitor when and where the various men's luncheon clubs meet. These clubs not only talk and eat, but play energetic roles in improving their city.

Kingsporters don't pretend that everything in their city is perfect yet. There are some substandard homes on Long Island in the Holston. The traffic plan, draw up before the automobile really came into its own, is being revised. There is a continuing fight to improve the 'scholastic standing of the schools, which have been housed in splendid modern structures. Businessmen say they'd like to see the hotel facilities increased. And there's room for improvement of some of the downtown buildings whose rough, unfinished look is testimony of the city's rapid growth.

But, if you stand on a corner of Broad St. Saturday morning, when the sidewalk is lined with men in blue jeans come from the hills, and swarming with women and children accomplishing Saturday shopping, you sense an energy which promises a fruitful future for the nation's "best planned city."