Kingsport: Cherokee River Crossing to Planned Factory City

The Cherokee called this confluence of the Holston River's north and south forks a crossing place, a gateway into the Overhill country of the mountains. Long Hunters and then Scots-Irish settlers pushed through in the seventeen seventies, and a river port called Christianville shipped salt and iron downstream through the Civil War era. Then the place went quiet.

In nineteen sixteen, a group of investors decided that quiet, flat river bottom with two converging rail lines was exactly right for something new: one of America's first thoroughly planned industrial cities. They hired Massachusetts planner John Nolen to design it from scratch, industry along the river, neighborhoods on the hills, a civic core with a church circle at its heart. George Eastman brought his chemical company in nineteen twenty, and Kingsport became the headquarters of Eastman Kodak's raw materials supply.

A Cherokee ford became a model city in under a decade, its plan still visible in the street grid today.