Appalachian Community Histories – Kingsport, Sullivan and Hawkins Counties: Long Island, King’s Boatyard, and Model City
Kingsport is often introduced as the “Model City,” a carefully planned industrial community built along the Holston River during the early twentieth century. That description is accurate, but it begins the story far too late.
Long before John Nolen drew curved streets and civic circles, the land around present-day Kingsport had already served as a Cherokee council ground, treaty site, military frontier, gateway into Kentucky, river port, boatbuilding center, Civil War battlefield, farming community, and railroad junction. The modern city grew from all of these earlier layers, even when its promoters preferred to present Kingsport as something entirely new.
The city’s history also reaches beyond a single county line. Most of Kingsport lies in Sullivan County, but its western limits extend into Hawkins County, while its industries, workers, transportation networks, and river system have long connected both counties. To understand Kingsport, one must follow the Holston River and the people who gathered beside it.
Long Island Before Kingsport
The oldest center of Kingsport’s history is Long Island of the Holston, located near the meeting of the North and South Forks of the Holston River. Long before European settlers arrived, the island stood within the Cherokee homeland and served as a sacred council and treaty ground.
Its importance came partly from geography. The island lay near a crossing of the Great Indian Warrior Path, a major route connecting Cherokee towns and hunting territories with lands farther north. Cherokee travelers, diplomats, warriors, and hunters used the surrounding paths, while the island offered a recognized place for councils and negotiations.
The National Historic Landmark documentation for Long Island describes it as a jealously protected Cherokee possession and a central site in the history of exploration and settlement in the Old Southwest. Artifacts found across the island also point toward a much longer period of Native occupation than written colonial records can document.
European traders and hunters increasingly passed through the area during the eighteenth century. Their arrival was not the beginning of the island’s history, but it was the beginning of a struggle over who would control the paths, rivers, hunting grounds, and settlements surrounding it.
In March 1775, Daniel Boone and a party of workers associated with Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Company began opening the route that became known as the Wilderness Road. The National Park Service documentation places the beginning of Boone’s trailmaking at Long Island. From there, the route passed through the Cumberland Gap and helped carry thousands of migrants into Kentucky.
That movement is often remembered as heroic westward settlement, but it also represented a growing invasion of Cherokee lands. Roads that opened opportunities for settlers placed greater pressure upon Native communities whose territories were being claimed through disputed purchases, colonial decrees, and treaties negotiated under increasingly unequal conditions.
War, Treaties, and the Cherokee Struggle for Long Island
The American Revolution brought open warfare to the Holston settlements. Many Cherokee leaders viewed the rebellion as an opportunity to resist the settlers who were occupying their lands, while the Americans considered Cherokee resistance a threat to their vulnerable frontier communities.
In July 1776, fighting occurred near Long Island and the surrounding flats. Settlers later constructed Fort Patrick Henry on the north bank of the South Fork of the Holston. From that position, Colonel William Christian assembled a force of approximately two thousand men for a campaign against Cherokee towns.
The campaign destroyed communities and food supplies and helped force Cherokee representatives into negotiations. The surviving proceedings of the 1777 Treaty of Long Island, also known as the Avery Treaty, preserve part of the diplomatic record created during meetings between Cherokee leaders and representatives of North Carolina and Virginia.
The treaty confirmed major land cessions, but Long Island itself remained a special case. Although settlers attempted to sell and inherit the island, the Cherokee claim continued. The Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that the 1777 treaty strengthened the Cherokee claim to Long Island and that the island was not formally ceded to the United States until the Dearborn Treaty of 1806.
The story is therefore more complicated than the familiar image of settlers simply arriving on unclaimed land. Kingsport developed within a landscape shaped by Cherokee diplomacy, armed resistance, forced concessions, and the gradual transfer of Native land into private ownership.
In 1976, the City of Kingsport returned a small portion of Long Island to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The returned acreage represented only a fraction of the island, but the transfer publicly acknowledged that Kingsport’s history did not begin with its twentieth-century industries or nineteenth-century river port.
A Departure Point for the West
Long Island also became a gathering place for migrants headed toward the interior of Tennessee. Travelers reached the Holston Valley overland, stopped near the island to gather supplies or construct boats, and then continued down the river.
In late 1779, John Donelson led a flotilla from the Long Island area on a difficult journey down the Tennessee River and up the Cumberland. The expedition helped establish the settlement that became Nashville. Donelson’s journal remains one of the principal firsthand accounts of that journey, although historians have carefully examined the authorship and later history of the surviving manuscript.
The expedition established a pattern. Families could travel overland to the Holston, build or purchase a flatboat, load their belongings, and follow the river westward. Boatbuilding and river commerce gradually transformed the land opposite Long Island into a working settlement.
The river did more than carry settlers. It carried salt, iron, agricultural products, timber, livestock, manufactured goods, and household supplies. Roads from southwestern Virginia and the surrounding Tennessee countryside converged near the river, making the future Kingsport area a natural point of exchange.
King’s Boatyard and the First Kingsport
In 1802, agents working for William King of Saltville, Virginia, established a formal boatyard at the settlement of Christianville near the western end of Long Island. King was deeply involved in the salt trade, and the boatyard helped move products and supplies through the region.
The place became known as King’s Boat Yard, King’s Port, and eventually Kingsport. The name came from commercial geography rather than royalty. It marked a place where roads met the river and where cargo could be transferred into vessels bound downstream.
Christianville was joined by the neighboring settlement of Rossville, which had been laid out in 1818. In 1822, the two communities were united under a charter as the town of Kingsport.
Richard Netherland established an inn near the boatyard in 1818, possibly adapting an earlier building connected to William King’s operation. The Netherland Inn served travelers, merchants, migrants, and boatmen moving through the Holston Valley.
The structure became one of the clearest surviving links to the first Kingsport. Its brick walls witnessed the period when the town depended upon the river rather than the factory, automobile, or railroad. Today, the inn and reconstructed boatyard buildings help preserve a landscape that otherwise might have disappeared beneath later industrial development.
The Civil War Comes to the Holston
By the middle of the nineteenth century, changing transportation routes had weakened Kingsport’s position as a river port. The Civil War brought further disruption to a region divided by political loyalty, military occupation, and guerrilla activity.
On December 13, 1864, Union forces participating in Major General George Stoneman’s winter raid reached Kingsport. The expedition was moving toward Confederate military and industrial targets in southwestern Virginia, including the salt works at Saltville.
Confederate Colonel Richard C. Morgan positioned approximately three hundred men along the eastern bank of the Holston near the old boatyard. Across the water, Union troops under Generals Alvan C. Gillem and Stephen G. Burbridge gathered in the fields around Rotherwood. The Confederates attempted to hold the river crossing, but Union cavalry found another crossing and threatened their rear.
The defense collapsed, Morgan was captured, and Stoneman’s men continued toward Virginia. A monument and Civil War Trails interpretation near Netherland Inn Road now mark the battlefield.
The engagement was small compared with battles such as Shiloh, Chickamauga, or Nashville, but it illustrated the strategic importance of the Holston crossings. The same geography that had made Kingsport useful to Cherokee travelers, settlers, merchants, and boatbuilders also made it valuable to armies.
After the war, the old town struggled to recover. River commerce no longer promised the same future, and Kingsport remained a scattered community rather than a thriving urban center. The city that later carried the Kingsport name would be planned around railroads and factories instead of flatboats.
The Railroad Creates a New Opportunity
The beginning of modern Kingsport came with the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway. George L. Carter recognized that the Holston Valley could support an industrial center connected to coalfields, timberlands, northern markets, and southern ports.
Railroad development changed the meaning of Kingsport’s location. The city still stood beside the Holston, but the river was no longer its only important transportation route. Rail connections could bring coal and raw materials into the valley while carrying finished products to distant markets.
Carter’s financial difficulties eventually led him to sell his Kingsport interests to New York financier John B. Dennis and Blair and Company around 1914. Dennis organized the Kingsport Improvement Corporation in 1915 and worked closely with J. Fred Johnson, one of the most influential promoters of the new town.
Their goal was not merely to open another factory settlement. They wanted an economically diverse industrial city whose companies would support one another while also selling to national markets. Cheap land, available natural resources, railroad access, and low-cost nonunion labor were central to the plan.
Factories were recruited to manufacture chemicals, paper, glass, textiles, books, building materials, and other products. The promoters encouraged homeownership and attempted to distinguish Kingsport from the single-company coal towns found elsewhere in Appalachia.
The result was still a city shaped by corporate power, but it was not controlled by only one employer. Kingsport’s interlocking industries gave it a broader economic base than many Appalachian industrial communities.
John Nolen and the Making of the Model City
Dennis and Johnson hired nationally recognized city planner John Nolen to help design the new Kingsport. Nolen’s general map, dated August 1, 1916, presented a city organized around industry, commerce, residential neighborhoods, public institutions, green spaces, and transportation.
A later downtown plan from 1919 refined the arrangement of streets and civic spaces. Church Circle became one of the plan’s most recognizable features, while curved roads and traffic circles departed from the rigid rectangular grids used in many American towns.
The plan separated industrial operations from residential districts while attempting to connect neighborhoods with schools, churches, parks, and shopping areas. The riverfront was largely reserved for industry, showing that economic production remained at the center of the city’s purpose.
Kingsport’s planning extended beyond streets. Consultants advised its leaders on architecture, landscaping, schools, sanitation, sewers, public health, and municipal administration. Columbia University educators were consulted about the school system, while New York reformers helped shape the city’s government.
In 1917, Kingsport received a new charter and adopted a city manager system governed by a Board of Mayor and Aldermen. It appears to have been the first Tennessee municipality organized under that form of government. The system placed daily administration in the hands of a professional manager rather than relying entirely upon elected officials.
The nickname “Model City” grew from this combination of planning, industrial development, civic reform, and professional administration. Kingsport was promoted as evidence that a modern industrial city could be created in the Appalachian South through coordinated private investment and expert planning.
The Limits of the Model
The Model City promised orderly growth and economic opportunity, but the benefits were never distributed equally. Kingsport developed during the era of Jim Crow, and its public institutions, neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces reflected racial segregation.
Black residents built their own churches, businesses, social networks, and educational institutions within the restrictions imposed upon them. The Riverview community became an important center of African American life in Kingsport, while Douglass School educated generations of Black children.
Photographs preserved by the Kingsport Archives show Douglass classrooms, teachers, student organizations, and athletic teams. They document a community that cannot be understood solely through the plans of industrialists and city administrators.
The George Washington Carver Branch Library opened in segregated Riverview on June 11, 1951. Its existence reflected discrimination within the larger library system, but it also became a valued community institution shaped by the residents it served.
These records complicate the idea of a perfectly planned city. Kingsport’s streets and industries may have been designed with unusual care, but planning did not eliminate racial inequality, labor conflict, class divisions, or differences in political power.
The history of Riverview, Douglass School, the Carver library, and Black industrial workers belongs at the center of Kingsport’s story rather than at its margins.
Factories, Workers, and the Great Depression
Kingsport grew rapidly after its 1917 incorporation. Within a decade, the city contained ten manufacturing plants employing more than three thousand workers.
Companies such as Tennessee Eastman, Kingsport Press, Mead, and Blue Ridge Glass became closely connected to the city’s identity. Factory whistles regulated daily schedules, while employee newspapers, company clubs, recreation programs, and industrial organizations influenced community life.
The Kingsport Press helped establish the city as a major printing center. Its surviving records, photographs, publications, and employee material document both the business of printing and the lives of the people who operated its machinery.
Tennessee Eastman became especially important during the Great Depression. While industries in many American cities reduced operations or closed, Eastman’s continued growth helped Kingsport avoid some of the worst effects experienced elsewhere. It became the city’s largest employer and an increasingly powerful presence in local life.
Industrial stability did not mean that every household prospered. Workers remained vulnerable to layoffs, injury, low wages, and changes in production. Yet Kingsport’s diversified economy allowed it to maintain growth during a period when many Appalachian communities faced severe economic collapse.
Kingsport and the Second World War
World War II transformed Kingsport into a nationally important center of explosives production. Tennessee Eastman scientists developed a continuous method for producing RDX, a powerful military explosive used in combination with TNT and other materials.
In 1942, Tennessee Eastman began constructing the Holston Ordnance Works along the river in Sullivan and Hawkins counties. The installation eventually covered more than six thousand acres and consisted of two principal areas located several miles apart.
By 1944, the works had become the largest producer of high explosives in the world. At its wartime peak, it employed nearly seven thousand people, approximately 40 percent of whom were women. The United States Army reports that the facility produced more than 858 million pounds of RDX and Composition B by the end of the war.
The National Archives preserves formerly classified reports documenting construction, engineering, production, employment, housing, transportation, accidents, medical services, and security. These records reveal the enormous human organization required to keep the plant operating around the clock.
Workers needed transportation for multiple shifts. New housing had to be constructed. Women entered jobs previously held by men as the draft created labor shortages. Records also document Black employment, job training, safety programs, recreational activities, production awards, and the constant effort to improve manufacturing methods.
The wartime expansion placed intense pressure upon Kingsport. Thousands of workers arrived, housing became scarce, families were displaced by industrial construction, and the relationship between the city and its factories grew even stronger.
After the war, Holston Ordnance Works entered standby status before being reactivated during the Korean War. It was renamed the Holston Army Ammunition Plant in 1963 and has remained part of the region’s industrial and military landscape.
Dams, Highways, and Postwar Expansion
The postwar period brought another transformation to the Holston River. The Tennessee Valley Authority began constructing Boone Dam in 1950 and completed it in 1952. Flood control was a major concern because Kingsport had suffered damaging floods in 1901 and 1940.
Fort Patrick Henry Dam was completed soon afterward within Kingsport. It generated electricity and helped regulate water flowing toward the city’s industries. The reservoirs also created new recreational landscapes and changed how local residents interacted with the river.
Highways and suburban development gradually redirected activity away from the old downtown. New commercial strips, subdivisions, shopping areas, and annexations expanded Kingsport’s physical reach, including farther into Hawkins County.
The same changes weakened some older neighborhoods and businesses. Downtown decline, industrial pollution, traffic congestion, and unplanned roadside development challenged the orderly vision of the early Model City.
Kingsport responded through redevelopment projects, historic preservation, parks, cultural institutions, and efforts to maintain a diversified economy. The city’s growth after World War II proved that no plan remains fixed once generations of residents begin reshaping it.
Long Island Becomes an Industrial Neighborhood
Long Island itself experienced nearly every major stage of Kingsport’s history. After its Cherokee period and its role in western migration, much of the island became agricultural land associated with the Netherland family and later owners.
During the twentieth century, part of the island developed into a working-class neighborhood known as Long Island Gardens. Stores, churches, restaurants, barbershops, an elementary school, and a large community field served residents who lived within sight of Kingsport’s industries.
Between roughly 1955 and 1963, the neighborhood reached its height with more than five hundred residences and approximately eighteen hundred people. The community declined after the mid-1960s as transportation changed, younger residents moved elsewhere, and industrial development consumed more of the landscape.
The collapse of a bridge connecting the island with the Tennessee Eastman area in 1967 further isolated the neighborhood. Industrial facilities eventually replaced the school and community field, leaving only fragments of the residential settlement.
Long Island therefore serves as a smaller version of Kingsport’s entire history. It moved from Cherokee homeland to disputed territory, from agricultural land to a migration center, from plantation and dairy farming to a working-class neighborhood, and finally toward intensive industrial use.
Preserving the Many Kingsports
Kingsport’s historical record survives in an unusually wide range of places. The Archives of the City of Kingsport preserves municipal records, industrial collections, photographs, family papers, business documents, maps, blueprints, postcards, civic records, and materials from local schools and organizations.
The Muriel C. Spoden Collection is particularly important for the history of Long Island, Netherland Inn, the Boatyard, early families, river travel, and historic preservation. The Kingsport Press Collection, Tennessee Eastman employee newspapers, Thomas McNeer photographs, Bays Mountain Park records, and Riverview photographs preserve other parts of the city’s development.
Cornell University holds John Nolen’s original Kingsport plans, while the National Archives preserves Holston Ordnance Works records. The Tennessee State Library and Archives, Sullivan County Archives, Hawkins County Archives, and East Tennessee State University’s Archives of Appalachia contain additional court records, maps, newspapers, manuscripts, oral histories, tax records, and family collections.
These sources reveal that there has never been only one Kingsport. There was the Cherokee treaty ground, the frontier fort, the river landing, the boatyard town, the Civil War crossing, the railroad venture, the planned industrial city, segregated Riverview, the wartime production center, and the postwar metropolitan community.
Each version left marks upon the landscape and upon the people who followed.
More Than the Model City
Kingsport’s twentieth-century planners gave the city its most familiar identity, but they did not create its history from an empty map. Their streets crossed older paths. Their factories rose beside a river already traveled by Cherokee people, explorers, migrants, boatmen, soldiers, farmers, and merchants.
The city’s industrial success came from careful planning, outside investment, local promotion, Appalachian labor, natural resources, railroad access, and the Holston River. It also came with segregation, displacement, pollution, corporate influence, and the loss of older landscapes.
To call Kingsport the Model City is therefore both useful and incomplete. The name captures the ambition of John Nolen, John B. Dennis, J. Fred Johnson, and the industrialists who imagined a modern city in the Appalachian South. It does not fully capture the Cherokee history of Long Island, the workers who built and operated its factories, the Black residents who sustained Riverview, or the communities transformed by industrial and federal development.
Kingsport’s real history is larger than the model. It is the story of a place repeatedly rebuilt around the same river, with each generation inheriting the roads, boundaries, opportunities, and unresolved questions left by the one before it.
Sources & Further Reading
Black in Appalachia. “Douglass School, Kingsport, Tennessee.” Community History Digital Archive. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://blackinappalachia.omeka.net/items/show/1636
Black in Appalachia. “Kingsport Community History Project.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.blackinappalachia.org/kingsport
Black in Appalachia. “Kingsport Collection.” Community History Digital Archive. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://blackinappalachia.omeka.net/collections/show/12
Brig, Kristin. “Planting the Corn and Hunting the British: The Treaty of the Long Island of the Holston of 1777 and the American Revolution.” Journal of East Tennessee History 88. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.easttnhistory.org/planting-the-corn-and-hunting-the-british/
Cornell University Library. “John Nolen Papers.” Cornell University Library Digital Collections. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://digital.library.cornell.edu/?f%5Barchival_collection_tesim%5D%5B%5D=John+Nolen+Papers
Donelson, John. “Donelson Journal.” 1779–1780. Tennessee Historical Society, Tennessee Virtual Archive. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/tfd/id/600/
Goodspeed Publishing Company. History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present, Together with Historical and Biographical Sketches of East Tennessee Counties. Nashville and Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1887. https://archive.org/details/historyoftenness01good_1
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Archives of the City of Kingsport.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/archives/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Kingsport Press Collection, ca. 1922–1993 and Undated.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding-aid-info/page/7/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Muriel C. Spoden Collection, 1800–2000.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding_aids/muriel-c-spoden-collection-1800-2000/
National Archives at Atlanta. “Decimal Files, Holston Ordnance Works, Record Group 156.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/rg156-kingsport-6883884.html
National Archives at Atlanta. “Historical Reports, 1941–1946, Holston Ordnance Works, Record Group 156.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/rg156-kingsport-6997147.html
National Archives at Atlanta. “Resumes of Activities, Holston Ordnance Works, Record Group 156.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/rg156-kingsport-6997224.html
National Archives at Atlanta. “Subject Files, Holston Ordnance Works, Record Group 156.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/rg156-kingsport-6997128.html
National Archives at Atlanta. “War Assets Administration Real Property Disposal Case Files, Holston Ordnance Works.” Record Group 270. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/atlanta/finding-aids/rg270-630563.html
National Park Service. “Long Island of the Holston.” National Historic Landmarks. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalhistoriclandmarks/list-of-nhls-by-state.htm
North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. “Proceedings of the Treaty of the Long Island of Holston River with the Cherokee Nations, Avery Treaty.” 1777. North Carolina Digital Collections. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://digital.ncdcr.gov/Documents/Detail/proceedings-of-the-treaty-of-the-long-island-of-holston-river-with-cherokee-nations-avery-treaty/6153047
Sanborn Map Company. “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Kingsport, Sullivan County, Tennessee.” November 1919. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3964km.g3964km_g083291919/
Sanborn Map Company. “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Kingsport, Sullivan County, Tennessee.” October 1925. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3964km.g3964km_g083291925/
Taylor, Oliver. Historic Sullivan: A History of Sullivan County, Tennessee, with Brief Biographies of the Makers of History. Bristol, TN: King Printing Company, 1909. https://www.loc.gov/item/09025291/
Ezzell, Patricia Bernard. “Long Island.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. Last modified March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/long-island/
Gordon, Susan L. “Holston Ordnance Works.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. Last modified March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/holston-ordnance-works/
Wolfe, Margaret Ripley. “Kingsport.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. Last modified March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/kingsport/
Wolfe, Margaret Ripley. “Sullivan County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. Last modified March 1, 2018. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/sullivan-county/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical Fact Sheets about Hawkins County.” Tennessee Secretary of State. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-hawkins-county
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical Fact Sheets about Sullivan County.” Tennessee Secretary of State. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-sullivan-county
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Boone.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/hydroelectric/boone
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Fort Patrick Henry.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/hydroelectric/fort-patrick-henry
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series 1, vol. 45, pt. 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth142228/
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series 1, vol. 45, pt. 2. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth142229/
Wolfe, Margaret Ripley. Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. https://books.google.com/books/about/Kingsport_Tennessee.html?id=d2PVLNgURWQC
Author Note: Kingsport is often remembered as a twentieth-century planned city, but its history reaches much farther back through Long Island, Cherokee diplomacy, river travel, and the Boatyard. I hope this article encourages readers to see the Model City as a layered Appalachian community shaped by Native history, industry, labor, segregation, and the Holston River.