Remembering Kingsport's Old Neighborhoods

 

The Old Neighborhoods

While digging around on my computer, I found a folder of old photos I used in 2004 (17 years ago!) to illustrate a speech I gave to the Friends of the Kingsport Archives. Many of the photos are from Kingsport’s first neighborhoods: Fairacres, White City, The Fifties.

I titled the speech REMEMBERING KINGSPORT’S NEIGHBORHOODS.

So let’s do that again, let’s Remember Kingsport’s Old Neighborhoods. 

How many people here have a photo like this in their family album? Or maybe I should ask how many people don’t have a picture like this in their family album?

This is what is known as the OUR FIRST HOUSE photo. And it’s a staple of photo albums, always has been.

That’s my mom.

And that’s my dad.

And right there – at her belly line - that’s me. She was pregnant with me.

And that’s our first house, 1433 Pineola Avenue.

Except I never lived there but more about that in a minute.

Is there anybody who doesn’t know where Pineola Avenue is?

I’ll bet Pineola is the most famous residential street in Kingsport - or at least the most famous that isn’t a thoroughfare, like Watauga.

I’ve looked through a lot of old city directories at the City of Kingsport Archives and I’ve been amazed at all the people who lived on Pineola, or its sister streets, Carolina and East Sevier (which was originally known as Walnut): doctors, lawyers, business owners, captains of industry and factory workers, all living side by side.

And that’s the first house that my mom and dad owned.

 

The Fifties (top), White City (middle), Shelby Street (bottom)

The first residential neighborhood in Kingsport - so I’m told - was the Fifties, those Tudor style houses up the hill from West Sullivan Street. For longtime residents, the houses up the hill from Supermarket Row. It was called the Fifties because there were plans for fifty houses, although the section ended up a few shy of 50.

The top picture in the group photo above is Hammond Park in the Fifties.

There were a few permanent houses before the Fifties - in particular the row houses on Shelby Street, behind the library. Those are in the bottom picture.

But the Fifties was the first planned neighborhood and as such was designated - of course - Neighborhood No. 2 on the first city plan.

Most of the houses in the Fifties had six rooms, three of them bedrooms, a linen closet -- oooo! -- a bathroom, which was a welcome and by no means standard feature in 1916, and a coal bin …and sold for $2,300. A 1916 Model T, by way of comparison, cost $290.

Neighborhood Number 3 on that first city plan was White City, that group of white wooden houses across from Sevier - old Dobyns-Bennett to folks like me - primarily on Yadkin. Deed restrictions in the neighborhood required that all the houses be painted white. And they still are.

That’s the middle picture in the photo above. George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott lived in White City for six months in 1922, two years before George H.W. was born, at 906 Norwood. You can’t see it in the picture. It’s just to the right of where the photo ends. There are only two houses on Norwood and it’s the one on the west side of the street with the screen porch.

John Nolen, who planned Kingsport, took photos of "hilltop houses" in The Fifties (top) and Shelby Street apartments (bottom) in 1918.

Neighborhood Number 4 in the old plan was called Armstrong Village, although it would be renamed Borden Mill Village in 1924 when the cotton mill came to town.

Armstrong Village was to be a segregated black section with homes of a high order, according to the original plan. But this met opposition and eventually the black neighborhood was situated in Riverview.

Early photos of Linville, Watauga and Oakdale (Borden Mill Village)

As the population exploded more residences went up.

J. Fred Johnson built his three-story mansion on the hill above the Bristol Highway, at 1322 Watauga Street in 1916. Bill Todd told me it was the first house on the ridge. The nearest neighbor was Flem Dobyns a half mile away in the old farmhouse on James Wiley Dobyns’ 250 acre stock farm. The Dobyns House is now 1434 Watauga.

People of my age refer to the Dobyns farmhouse as the Finucane house because it was for fifty years home to the wonderfully eccentric Finucane family, Tom and Charlotte and their thirteen children, eleven of them boys.

I went to school with Dan, who was somewhere in the middle of the pack of kids. He frequently came to school without socks. And once I visited his house I understood why. There were boys everywhere, on the couch, on the steps, on the porch. It would have been a task each morning just to find pants and a shirt.

When my class had a reunion, we invited Dan because he is pictured with our class in the yearbook. He wrote back, thanking us for inviting him but noting: “I was actually in the class ahead of you but I didn’t graduate until the class behind you. I was just passing through.”

It wasn’t for lack of smarts that he graduated late. He was just shall we say unfocused.

The father was a chemist at Eastman, a noted bird watcher famous for his absences from work. I have been told that he would be driving to the plant, spot a rare bird, and chase after the bird, neglecting to call and tell anyone he wouldn’t be in.

Homes in Fairacres

 

In 1926 the Dobyns Brothers hired architect Earl Draper in Charlotte to help them subdivide the farm. Here’s what the original plat map looked like.

You can see how Crescent Drive got its name.

What we know today as Dobyns Drive was on this plat map called Windsor Avenue.

There were also streets named Brentwood and Milltonia that never made it to the paving stage.

Fairacres quickly became Kingsport’s most desirable neighborhood.

More Fairacres homes

Soon more folks were moving out near Mr. Johnson. Colonel Palmer who ran Kingsport Press, built a large green house at the corner of Watauga and Longview.

Mr. Baylor of Baylor Nelms Furniture built on Watauga. His old house at 1224 Watauga was for sale in 2004 for $290,000, W.B. Greene of W.B. Greene Hardware built on the other side of the street.

I didn’t grow up in Fairacres but many of my friends did. I unfurled many a toilet paper roll into the trees of Fairacres. I nervously approached the front door of many of those houses, hoping against hope that my date’s father was not home.

I’ve lived in a lot of other cities in my life and I don’t think I’ve ever been in another neighborhood with more architectural variety than Fairacres.

 

Which brings me to the arrival of my family in Kingsport. We are newcomers. We didn’t get here till the thirties.

My father graduated from Fall Branch High School in 1934, president of the first chapter of the Future Farmers of America chapter at the school, and immediately took a job at the old Army Store on Main Street. He worked in sales in Kingsport for the next half century. He never farmed. Fact is he couldn’t even grow tomatoes in our back yard, not that he didn’t try, over and over and over he tried.

When he got that first job in Kingsport, he commuted to town from Fall Branch, riding the bus at first and debarking at the city bus terminal, a couple of blocks away from the Army Store.

Main Street Bus Terminal

Later he car-pooled with a few Eastman employees in Fall Branch. He didn’t move to Kingsport because he couldn’t find a place to stay. Housing was in short supply once Eastman started gearing up in the thirties.

And that gave a lot of people ideas and began the great development period of the forties. Build and rent. Build and sell.

My mother and father got married in 1939 and moved in with his parents in their Fall Branch farmhouse.

A few months later my mother met my father at the gate and told him, “This isn’t working.” I think you could say it was an ultimatum.

So he began looking for housing in Kingsport.

He finally found two rooms for rent for $14 a month.

Many people back then rented out parts of their home without fear of ending up on “Dateline: Kingsport.”

In November 1939 they moved into a home at 112 Morgan Street in Litz Manor owned by Herb and Walter Shankel. For the next 65 years they would either live in the same house or in the house next door to the Shankels. Talk about a lifetime of friendship. 

Soon my father was drafted and while he was in the Pacific Theater my mother took the money he was sending home and bought a small house, moving our family from renters to homeowners. The dream of owning a home had been realized.

My mother bought a house in Winston Terrace.

Entrance to Winston Terrace (top) and typical house

I was born in Kingsport at Holston Valley Community Hospital. I grew up here and went to Johnson Elementary in Greenacres. And I had never in my life heard of Winston Terrace until I read in the city directory of that time that our house was in Winston Terrace

I’ve heard that neighborhood referred to by a lot of names, Greenfields, Greenacres - mistakenly - but I had never heard of Winston Terrace till I saw it in the old city directory.

I asked my friend Rod Irvin who grew up on Carolina Avenue if he had ever heard it called Winston Terrace and he said no. So I asked him what they called his neighborhood. He said, Carolina Avenue. 

Why was it Winston Terrace? N.H. Winston, a New York developer, read about the housing shortage in Kingsport in a national magazine and began building here. He tucked tail and went home after building 31 houses around the old Kingsport Golf Course. Including my family’s house.

Other developers, both here and elsewhere, heard about the housing shortage and raced to Kingsport to build homes.

Cherokee Village

A local company, Cherokee Development, built Cherokee Village at about the same time: 110 buildings, all duplex. The two-bedroom units rented for $44 a month, the three-bedroom models for $52.50 a month

Kingsport Gardens, those apartment buildings opposite the Civic Auditorium, were also built about this time. It was the city’s first large scale apartment house development, built by J. Fred Johnson’s Kingsport Development; there were 52 apartments and 34 rental homes.

I would call this photo the Our First Family Home Photo. I’m in this photo, too, you just can't see me because I was inside where any toddler should be in a snow storm. My mother and father had moved into our house the week before I was born.

The house is in the Ridgeway neighborhood although I didn’t know that until I was ten or eleven and the boys in my neighborhood formed a baseball team. We didn’t know what to call our team because our neighborhood didn’t have a name, as far as we knew. If someone asked where I lived, I always said, “Just past Garden Basket.” And you can’t name a team the Just Past Garden Basket Raiders. So we went to the neighborhood intellectual Ruth Isley for guidance. She’d helped us name our neighborhood newspaper, the Clover Klatch, after Clover St.

She informed us we lived in Ridgeway and we became the Ridgeway Hurricanes, mostly so we could use the slogan, “All our games are a breeze.” We were clever kids.

This was 1947 and this marked the big postwar boom in housing and also the big postwar housing shortage in Kingsport. Margy Clark and her husband Dick moved here in 1950, the year that Eastman hired 50 PhD’s, and they couldn’t find a place to live. Eastman was putting people up in the Kingsport Inn and Majer’s Motel, anywhere they could find space.

John Nolen photo of Kingsport Inn

And with the housing boom came another boom, the baby boom. To give you an illustration, in 1956 D-B graduated 211 students. Ten years later in 1966 as baby boomers started graduating that number doubled to 437 graduates. It didn’t go below 400 again until 1982.

To accommodate this growing population Kingsport needed more neighborhoods. Greenacres was developed around Johnson School. Preston Woods rose out of the woods along Orebank Road. Sevier Terrace was carved out of a hillside on the west side of town. Ridgefields was built on farmland along the Holston. And Winston Terrace was continued without its name. These were great places to grow up.

I know because I grew up in one and used to visit friends in others.

My favorite neighborhood to visit when I was a kid was Carolina Avenue. There were kids everywhere, spilling out of houses, onto sidewalks and vacant lots. Of course this was before air conditioning, cable TV and video games.

Rod Irvin’s mother Inez told me she counted once in the fifties and there were 86 kids living within a block of their house.

No wonder it was such a fun neighborhood. And a great era.

 

A few months back I did a deep dive on my old “Ridgeway” neighborhood:

The reason My Old Neighborhood exists is because of the rock quarry, the one our mothers warned us about. “You can go play with Lance Harris but don’t you two go near the rock quarry,” my mother would say. (Of course that made us want to go near the rock quarry even more.)

Harvey Brooks, a pioneer of Kingsport, thought that east Kingsport needed more homes. And to build those new homes he would need rock and sand to make concrete. So in 1931 he opened a rock quarry just off Bristol Highway in what was then called Hillcrest. He called the company Central Rock and Sand. (The gravel road that led up to the quarry would later be named Central Street.)

Soon the company was doing so well that he installed floodlights at the quarry so he could employ a second night shift of workers. He told the Kingsport Times he would add 15 night shift workers to his payroll to keep up with demand.

Brooks is most famous today for his mansion on 11-W west of town, Allandale. In 1927 he had built a residential log house on Orebank Road (it’s still there).

In 1937 he renamed his company Brooks Sand and Gravel.

And that’s when he began to develop the hillside property around the quarry.

He announced this new development, the Ridgeway Addition, in an April 9, 1937 ad in the Kingsport Times. Ridgeway opened with three “modern” homes on Ashley Street.

The first two streets in Ridgeway were Conway and Ashley. Among the first residents, as announced in the Kingsport Times, were J. D. and Agnes Wininger and Mr. and Mrs. David Pyle and newborn daughter Patricia Ann. (Both lived on the new Ridgeway Street, which ran parallel to Ashley.)

Soon lot sales in the Ridgeway Addition were regularly appearing in the Times. In 1939 lots were advertised for $550.

Eight years later my family moved into the three-bedroom brick house in Ridgeway. Then we were “just past the Upper Circle” because the Garden Basket hadn’t been built yet.

It would be another ten years before Ruth Isley told me it was really called Ridgeway.

 

 R.I. P. Reggie Moody 1947-2021

 

Reggie, who died last week, was in my second grade class at Johnson and graduated with me from D-B in 1965. He studied engineering at UT and spent his career with the North Carolina Transportation Department.

I remember a halftime show from a football game in '63 or '64. The D-B band marched out on the J. Fred Johnson field and lined up in concert formation. They were playing some romantic theme when tuba player Reggie Moody started a slow, dreamy spin out of formation. Drum major John Stone chased him back in line. It was hilarious.

Tuba section with Reggie in the middle in 1964