Kingsport Has Done This Before

Most of what gets said about AI around here treats it like weather. Something rolling in from somewhere else, aimed at somebody's job, and the most you can do is bring the porch furniture in.

I spent this fall writing the history of how the Tri-Cities got online, one layer at a time. The oldest domain names, the bulletin boards under them, and the dial-up companies that sold the internet by the hour. The first piece said the region built a chemical company, a railroad town, and an ammunition plant before it built a website. This is those older layers.

It's also the long version of a piece I wrote in July for the Tri-Cities AI Lab blog. This one has a timeline nearly four times the size, starting half a century earlier, and more of the parts that didn't go well. Those parts belong in it.

The town that got skipped

Before there was a city here, there was a river and an island. The Long Island of the Holston was Cherokee ground for a very long time before anybody wrote a deed for it, and in 1775 it was the jumping-off point for the Wilderness Road west through Cumberland Gap. The first advantage this place had was geography. The Holston was navigable from here downstream, which made the north bank a natural place to build boats.

In 1802, William King of Saltville set up a freight business at what everybody called the Boat Yard. Salt came over the mountain by wagon from his works in Virginia and went downriver by flatboat, some of it as far as Natchez. In March 1816 alone, the yard shipped 403,050 pounds of salt and 28,267 pounds of iron. When the settlements of Christianville and Rossville incorporated together on August 21, 1822, they took the name Kingsport. Which King they had in mind is still argued, and I'll come back to that.

Then the railroads came through East Tennessee and went somewhere else. The Virginia and Tennessee ran its first train into Bristol on October 1, 1856. The East Tennessee and Virginia connected Knoxville to Bristol by 1858, through a water stop that became Johnson's Depot and later Johnson City. A river port is only as good as what the river can beat, and a flatboat could not beat a train. The Civil War finished the job. After a small battle here in December 1864 and the collapse that followed, the town more or less stopped working as a town. Nearly every local history says Kingsport lost its charter, including the city's own centennial history and its historic zoning guidelines, and the centennial history calls the four decades after that a period of economic struggle. What none of them do is point to the act that took the charter away. I'll come back to that too.

So for roughly forty years, Kingsport wasn't a struggling town so much as a former one. Vince Staten has pointed out that by the time the second charter came along in 1917, the few people still living in old Kingsport had apparently forgotten, or never known, that there was a first one. The city that exists today wasn't restored in 1917. It was incorporated from scratch, under a new act, as if the first one had never happened.

That's the before picture, and it's the last sad paragraph for a while. When I say Kingsport has done this before, I don't mean it as a figure of speech. This place ran the experiment of letting a new technology pass it by exactly once. Nearly everything the region is known for came out of the decision not to let it happen twice.

The railroad that restarted a city

George L. Carter wasn't trying to found the Model City. He was trying to move coal. His Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio, completed through here in 1909, went through 55 tunnels and some of the meanest terrain in the East, and in constant dollars it is often called the most expensive railroad ever built in America.

Railroads need freight, so the backers went looking for it. The Tennessee Encyclopedia lists "the desire to create traffic for the railroad" among the founding reasons for the whole town. The first big plant, Clinchfield Portland Cement, opened in 1910, and its early customer was the railroad, which needed cement to line its tunnels. A brick plant came in 1911 and burned coal the railroad delivered.

Nobody wrote a mission statement about embracing emerging technology. They laid track and then made phone calls. The pitch that rebuilt Kingsport was written around a rail line, and the first customers were the rail line.

Built on purpose

When Carter's money ran short, he sold out around 1914 to John B. Dennis and Blair and Company of New York. Dennis organized the Kingsport Improvement Corporation the next year and brought in J. Fred Johnson, Carter's brother-in-law, to sell the town. They hired experts for everything. John Nolen's firm for the plan, well-known architects for the buildings, Columbia University for the schools, the state health board for sanitation. According to Margaret Ripley Wolfe, who wrote the book on this, they took the advice and never once handed over the decisions.

Nolen's plan zoned it deliberately. Industry along the river and rails, commerce up Broad Street, churches and homes on the higher ground, anchored on Church Circle, with some of the earliest traffic circles in the country. Kingsport drivers have been mad about roundabouts longer than almost anybody in America.

The part I like best happened before the charter. Kingsport Waterworks dammed a gap on Bays Mountain, and water started flowing down to town in November 1916. The city was incorporated in early 1917. Kingsport had running water three months before the new city legally existed, which is the right order to do things in and almost nobody does it that way.

The second charter came in 1917, and Kingsport appears to have been the first city in Tennessee run under a city manager. Jeff Fleming, who spent 35 years working for the city and rose from planning intern to city manager, traced the "Model City" name to the National Civic League's 1915 Model City Charter, a blueprint for professional, nonpartisan government that Kingsport adopted. The nickname was about how the town would be run, not how pretty the streets were. Wolfe calls the result the first economically diversified, professionally planned, and privately financed city in twentieth-century America. Not a company town. Not an accident.

The honest part belongs right here, not in a footnote. The same plan that gave us Church Circle confined the city's Black residents to small, crowded lots near the industrial zones, and the green spaces in Nolen's drawings mostly stayed in the drawings. A plan carries the assumptions of the people who draw it. The founders built something remarkable. They did not build it for everyone equally, and both of those things are true.

Two chemical companies, one war

Kingsport got a chemical industry twice, from the same war, for almost the same reason.

The first time was 1915. World War I had cut off the German dyes American mills depended on, and Federal Dyestuff and Chemical set up in Kingsport to replace them. It incorporated that October and had 29 buildings standing by the end of 1916. Then the war ended. The plant was sold in 1918, became Union Dye and Chemical, and went bankrupt in 1921. It was built for one moment and went when the moment did.

The second time, the war had cut Kodak off from the German chemicals it needed for film, and George Eastman decided he would not depend on a supply chain he couldn't control again. Meanwhile the federal government had built half a wood-distillation plant in Kingsport for wartime methanol, and when the war ended, Washington did what Washington does with half a factory. It walked away. J. Fred Johnson got Kodak's scouts down here in early 1920. Eastman visited that summer, bought the 35 acres and the unfinished buildings, and incorporated Tennessee Eastman on July 17, 1920, with $3.5 million in capital.

Every small business owner reading this just felt seen.

The plant lost money for years and got by partly by pressing its waste charcoal dust into briquettes. The company that came to define the region spent part of its first decade as, among other things, a grill fuel operation. And the technology Eastman came here for, distilling chemicals out of hardwood, was priced out within about a decade by cheaper synthetic methanol.

Here is the difference between the two companies. Federal Dyestuff was built to do one thing. Tennessee Eastman treated its founding technology as a starting point. In 1930 it began making cellulose acetate for Kodak's safety film, and in 1931 Kingsport started making acetate yarn at scale, 287,000 pounds that first year. In 1932 came Tenite, an early plastic used for radio knobs, telephones, toys, and steering wheels, and 1932 was the first year the company sold more to outside customers than to Kodak. The founding technology died almost immediately. The company lived.

The interlocking city

Pick up a book made at Kingsport Press in the 1920s and you were holding most of the town. The paper came from the pulp mill across the street that became Mead. The cover cloth came from Holliston Mills next door, woven from fabric made at Borden Mills. The printing and binding happened on Press machines, and the finished books left on the Clinchfield. The founders called it interlocking industry and built it on purpose.

A hundred years later, consultants charge good money to explain "business ecosystems." Kingsport's founders just called it the plan.

The Press's first order, in January 1923, was 50,000 copies of the New Testament, and by the 1950s it was the largest complete book manufacturer in the world. A decade after the charter, ten manufacturers here employed 3,383 people. When the Depression hollowed out towns all over Appalachia, the Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that Kingsport was an anomaly, an industrial city that kept growing. Connected businesses survive what isolated ones can't. That was true in 1930 and it hasn't stopped being true.

The quieter machines

Not every new technology arrived with a smokestack.

The region's first radio station, WOPI, signed on in Bristol on June 15, 1929, the first between Knoxville and Roanoke. According to the station's own history, the first broadcast that evening featured the Kingsport Concert Band. A Kingsport band, on a Bristol station, reaching anybody with a set. That's the Tri-Cities in one sentence.

Eight years later the three cities did something that still sounds a little unusual around here. They built one thing together. Johnson City's airfield and Kingsport's airstrip were both too small to grow, so the cities and Sullivan County pooled their money and the WPA's, and McKellar Field was dedicated on November 5, 1937, between all three. It was the largest WPA airport project in the state at the time. You know it as Tri-Cities Airport.

Kingsport got its own radio voice in 1940. WKPT signed on and called itself "The Nation's Model Station," and in the 1940s it linked with WOPI for area-wide programs as the Sister City Network. Sixty years later, WKPT's owner put on what it says was Tennessee's first digital television station. The Model City has always been willing to put the nickname on things.

The powder plant

In 1942 the Army asked a photography chemicals company to mass-produce the most powerful explosive in the world. That's roughly like asking your printer repairman to build a rocket, and by every account it surprised the people at Tennessee Eastman too. Then they said yes.

The explosive was RDX. The British could make it in small, careful batches. Winning the war required making it by the trainload, and Tennessee Eastman's chemists worked out a continuous production process with almost unbelievable speed. The government handed the company a $100 million project, about $1.5 billion in today's money, called Holston Ordnance Works, and by the end of the war it was the largest explosives plant in the world.

Some of those workers took crash courses in chemistry at East Tennessee State Teachers College to qualify. When the technology changed overnight, the region's answer was a training pipeline. That was 1943.

One of the names we still have is Lois Henry, from out near Blountville. She walked about a mile and a half to catch the bus that carried her to the lines at Area B, spent her shifts around the most powerful explosive on earth, and wasn't allowed to tell anyone what she did there. She learned an industry that hadn't existed in this valley two years earlier, and she was one of thousands.

The Torpex made here is credited with helping break the German U-boat campaign in the Atlantic. And on the strength of Holston, General Leslie Groves arranged for Tennessee Eastman to run the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, which produced the uranium-235 for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. People from this valley helped end the Second World War, and some of what they built is still a hard thing to look at directly. Holston still operates as the Holston Army Ammunition Plant.

Reinvention as a habit

The pattern kept repeating, quieter but no less stubborn.

In the early 1950s Tennessee Eastman developed acetate filter tow for cigarette filters, and it carried the company for half a century. In 1966 a vocational school opened in Sullivan County with two buildings, six programs, and 35 students. The six were auto mechanics, drafting and tool design, electrical technology, machine shop, office occupations, and welding, which is a fair list of what the region needed people to know that year. It's Northeast State now, and it turns 60 this year.

When the oil shocks of the 1970s made petroleum a liability, Eastman built the first commercial plant in America to make industrial chemicals from coal, and opened it in 1983. When the inputs got scary, this region changed the inputs, using the rock under its own mountains. It may be the most East Tennessee solution ever engineered.

Then in 1994 Kodak spun off its chemical business, and Eastman Chemical became an independent company. On day one it was the tenth largest chemical company in the United States, and the headquarters stayed here. Kodak, famously, struggled with its own technology shift. Its Kingsport offspring had been shifting since 1920.

What it cost

Not every chapter is a victory lap, and a version of this story without the bill would be selling something.

At about 4:45 on the afternoon of October 4, 1960, the aniline division at Tennessee Eastman exploded. The city archives count fifteen dead and about 200 injured. An Eastman engineer's 2004 reinvestigation of the accident, the worst in the company's history, put the toll at sixteen. The company instituted new safety review programs afterward. On October 4, 2017, fifty-seven years to the day, coal gas explosions at the plant sent a black plume over town and told people nearby to shelter in place.

Kingsport Press went through one of the longest strikes in American history, starting March 11, 1963 and running into the spring of 1967. It split neighbors, and some of that never healed. The Press merged into Arcata National in 1969, passed through a chain of larger owners, and in April 2006 Quebecor World announced it was closing the plant. A workforce once counted in the thousands was down to a few hundred at the end. The internet and a global printing industry did not ask permission.

Then there's the air. In 2013 the EPA designated the area around Eastman's Kingsport plant as failing the federal one-hour standard for sulfur dioxide, most of it from coal-fired boilers. The area missed its 2018 deadline. Eastman spent $85 million converting five boilers from coal to natural gas in 2018, added controls to others, and shut more down. Emissions from the coal boilers fell by about 85 percent between 2011 and 2022.

On October 29, 2026, the EPA proposed declaring that the Kingsport area now meets the standard. Comments are open through November 30. That's thirteen years from the designation to a proposal to lift it, and the fix was one more change of inputs. I'm not sure whether to file that under the cost or under the habit, and I suspect the honest answer is both.

And the Press property itself? It was donated to the city, and today the site of a shuttered printing empire holds the farmers market, a grocery store, and a carousel whose animals were carved and painted by more than 300 volunteers, many of whom had never carved anything before. It opened in July 2015. That's either poetry or just very Kingsport. Probably both.

The layer I know

In 1983, the same year Eastman started turning coal into chemicals, a Kingsport man named Hal Dougherty wired four floppy drives to an Atari 800, plugged in a 1200 baud modem, and started answering the phone with a computer. I'd put both of those on the same timeline without blinking. One made chemicals from coal and the other made a community out of phone lines, and both were somebody here deciding to learn the new thing.

That layer is the one I've spent the fall on, so here's the short version with links to the long ones. A Unix machine at Med-Systems in Kingsport was trading Usenet news and email by 1989, years before anybody sold internet access here. The oldest domain name still registered in the region, zfx.com, belongs to a Kingsport graphics shop and dates from February 12, 1993. Eastman's emn.com came that July. The domains piece has the rest. The bulletin boards peaked at 24 in the FidoNet list in June 1994. And starting in late 1994, two Kingsport companies began selling dial-up, one of them from a basement on four phone lines. In 1996 one of them took the phone company to the state over whether a modem is a telephone switch, and won. That's part three.

I was in high school, rebuilding hand-me-down PCs out of parts, when the first Tri-Cities websites went up. I built my first paid website around 2002, for a rug company whose owner walked into my PC repair shop. In 2012 I took over the newspaper websites, and found out years later from a reader that ZFx, the company behind that oldest domain, had built the first content management system the Times News site ran on. In 2014 I built the City of Kingsport's website, in a city that hadn't registered kingsporttn.gov until 2008, and looked after it until 2025. I also built and kept up the Bays Mountain Park site for eight years, which is as close as I've come to running a planetarium.

None of that is in the timeline, and it shouldn't be. I mention it because it's the part of this story I can personally vouch for, and because it's the same story at a smaller scale. Somebody shows up with a tool nobody here has used, and somebody else says fine, teach me.

The full circle

Which brings us to the single best fact in all of this.

In March 2024, Eastman started up a molecular recycling plant in Kingsport built to break down 110,000 metric tons of waste plastic a year. The process is called methanolysis. In October 2026 the Department of Energy reinstated a $375 million award that now includes expanding the Kingsport plant's output by about 30 percent.

The company that came here in 1920 to make methanol out of Appalachian hardwood now uses methanol chemistry in reverse to un-make plastic. Out in front of its headquarters there's a sculpture called the Old Hand, made for the 2020 centennial, of a hand holding a methanol molecule. If you wrote that ending into a novel, an editor would cut it for being too neat.

And now, AI

It's already here, and mostly it's boring, which I mean as a compliment.

In May 2021 Eastman launched Fluid Genius, an AI tool that reads lab samples of industrial heat transfer fluid and tells a plant when its system needs attention before something breaks. That's about the least dramatic use of artificial intelligence I can think of, and it's typical of how new technology has always shown up here. It's a tool you learn, and then you get back to work.

Call the City of Kingsport about your water bill now and there's a decent chance you'll talk to Grace, the city's AI call agent. She started as a pilot and went live this spring on a customer service line staffed by about a dozen people for roughly 40,000 water customers. By the vendor's July case study, Grace had handled 18,100 interactions and was taking about half to 60 percent of calls, in English and Spanish, and handing the complicated ones to a person. The page that introduces her sits on the city website I built, though Grace herself is the city's and the vendor's work, not mine.

Ballad Health runs AI in its pharmacy systems that checks prescriptions against each patient's profile and flags possible medication errors. The Niswonger Foundation, UT Knoxville, Kingsport City Schools, Sullivan County Schools, and Ballad won a Future Forward grant from SCORE, the statewide education group, to build an AI and data science credential for high school students here. And in September, ETSU and Kingsport City Schools won an award to train assistant principals, coaches, and teacher leaders to use AI responsibly. It's the 1943 chemistry course with better classrooms.

A fair disclosure, since this is my own site. I run an AI consulting practice, so weigh my optimism accordingly. And the skeptics around here have earned their skepticism. This region has been told before that a new technology would be good for it, and sometimes the bill came as an explosion, a four-year strike, or thirteen years on the federal list for air that failed a standard. The answer to a new tool has never been faith. It's learning it well enough to know what it's good for, what it costs, and who's going to pay.

What the tools never changed

So no, AI isn't bigger than the railroad, and it isn't the next Eastman. Every generation is convinced its technology is unprecedented, and every generation is at least half wrong.

What two hundred years of this shows is that Kingsport's advantage was never really the river, or the cheap land, or the rail access, or even the war contracts. Those brought opportunities here. What kept them here was people. Generation after generation of people in this valley looked at something they'd never seen before, a flatboat, a cement kiln, a chemical process, a printing press, an explosive, a gasifier, an Atari with four floppy drives, and answered the same way. Fine, teach me.

The tools change. The learning doesn't. Kingsport has done this before.

What I couldn't settle

Same rule as the rest of the series. Where the records disagree, I'm telling you they disagree instead of picking one.

• Which King. Two different Kings bought lots at the Boat Yard on the same day in 1802. The city has long credited Col. James King, the iron maker from near Bristol. Gary T. Clark's research in the library archives makes the case for William King, the salt maker, whose business moved far more freight. Neither man ever lived here.
• Whether the first charter was ever taken away. The centennial commission, the city's historic zoning guidelines, and Jeff Fleming all say Kingsport lost it after the Civil War. A Johnson City Press history item puts it at 1879, citing a Facebook page, and 1879 is the year the legislature famously repealed Memphis's charter, so the date is plausible. But I haven't found the act itself, and neither has anyone I've read. Staten's account, that the people still living here forgot or never knew they'd been chartered, fits a charter that just went unused as well as one that was repealed. One local reader thinks it was never formally lost. If you have the act, or proof there wasn't one, I'd like to see it.
• The 1960 toll. Fifteen in the city archives and the reports at the time. Sixteen in Eastman's own 2004 reinvestigation. I've given both.
• WKPT's first day. The centennial timeline lists February 2, 1940. The station's history as usually summarized says July 14, 1940. The year is solid.
• Kingsport's first factory. The library's finding aid calls Federal Dyestuff the first manufacturing facility built in Kingsport. Other accounts put the cement plant five years earlier. It may depend on where you drew the line in 1910, when there legally wasn't a Kingsport to draw it around.

Sources

• Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City (University Press of Kentucky, 1987), and her Kingsport entry in the Tennessee Encyclopedia
• Tennessee Encyclopedia, Tennessee Eastman Company and Johnson City
• Jeff Fleming, "Why Kingsport Is Called the Model City," Kingsport Spirit, July 2026
• Kingsport Centennial Commission, important events and timeline
• Vince Staten, "Kingsport is 100. Also 200." (2022)
• Gary T. Clark, "Kingsport, TN's Namesake," Discover Kingsport
• National Park Service, Long Island of the Holston; Britannica, Kingsport
• Archives of Appalachia, ETSU, Bristol depot
• Clinchfield.org
• Ken March, "Tales of the Century: Kingsport, Tennessee," AIChE, 2017
• Kingsport Public Library and Archives, Robert J. Baptista Collection (Federal Dyestuff), Kingsport Press Collection, and 1960 explosion photographs
• Bays Mountain History, The Dam and park timeline; City of Kingsport, Bays Mountain Dam
• Eastman, company history, air quality, and SEC filings; International Directory of Company Histories
• WOPI, station history; Kingsport Centennial Commission, WKPT
• Living New Deal, Tri-Cities Regional Airport
• Colin F. Baxter, The Secret History of RDX (University Press of Kentucky, 2018); Appalachian Places; Alice Lovejoy, Tales of Militant Chemistry (2025)
• Peter Lodal, "Distant replay," Process Safety Progress, 2004; Manufacturing.net on the 2017 explosions
• Northeast State, 60 years
• Federal Register, Sullivan County sulfur dioxide area, 2018, 2022, and October 29, 2026; Environment+Energy Leader
• City of Kingsport on GigKingsport, the carousel, and Grace; Engage Kingsport on the Press property
• Hansen, City of Kingsport case study (July 2026); Energy Central
• Hydrocarbon Processing on the DOE award; Eastman via PR Newswire on Fluid Genius
• Ballad Health; SCORE; ETSU
• The Tri-Cities Tech History series on this site, part one, part two, and part three