Welcome back. Glad you're here.

I read this story once years ago and it stuck with me for the wrong reason. The Bush part is what everybody repeats. The part I keep coming back to is what White City was built to do in the first place.

In today's post:

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Here’s an interesting one you may not know. A United State’s President's family lived in Kingsport once. It comes up at dinner tables and in comment sections, usually at the tail end of a conversation about something else, and it stops right there at the fact itself.

What almost nobody knows is what that street was built for.

The address is 906 Norwood Street, in White City. Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush moved in sometime in 1922 and stayed about six months. He was twenty-seven, a year out of his wedding at Kennebunkport, working for the Simmons Hardware Company out of St. Louis. The company sent him to upper East Tennessee to manage the sale of a saddlery plant. That is the whole reason the Bush family ever set foot in Sullivan County. A hardware man came down to close out a leather operation.

Their first son was born that August, in Maine. Their second son, George Herbert Walker Bush, was born in Massachusetts in 1924, two years after the Kingsport stretch had ended. So the future president never lived on Norwood. His parents did, in a rented house on a street with two houses on it.

White City went up starting in 1919, drawn by Clinton Mackenzie, the New York architect who also did the Clinchfield depot and the Kingsport Inn. The deeds required that the houses be painted white, which is where the name came from. The pitch was that every working man in Kingsport could own the house he slept in. The homes sold at cost. The lots went for a nominal charge on top of that. In January 1920 the Times reported that Kingsport was believed to be the first city in the country to sell homes to its own residents on fifteen-year terms.

Twelve of them sold in the first ten days.

A mill town that had been a city for two years decided the people running its machines should hold deeds instead of leases, then built the houses to prove it. Prescott Bush was a Yale man in a saddlery deal, renting inside somebody else's idea about who a house ought to belong to.

Sixty-six years later his son came back.

On a Saturday in 1988, with the Republican nomination still ahead of him, Vice President Bush turned up on Norwood Street to see the place. Stephen and Jane Carper owned it by then. Before the motorcade arrived, Stephen went out and planted a FOR SALE sign in the front yard as a joke. Jane had coffee going and chocolate chip cookies ready. Bush ate the cookies. Then he pitched horseshoes in the yard with Stephen and turned out to be good at it, which tracks, because horseshoes was the man's real hobby. He later put pits in at the White House and at Camp David and played a round against Boris Yeltsin.

The quiet block in front of John Sevier Middle School filled up with people who had not planned on being there. Small kids wandered past the Secret Service and the police barriers like they were traffic cones. A woman practiced with her new video camera. Somebody's parents dropped a six-year-old at a basketball game, saw the crowd, and stayed.

Eight years before that, Dorothy Bush had been in Northeast Tennessee for her son's first run at the presidency. Somebody asked her about Kingsport. She said she remembered the little white village where they lived, and she remembered the Kingsport Inn.

The Inn opened in 1917 at 415 Broad Street, the same year the city was chartered. It closed in the spring of 1960 and came down that year. She was describing a building that had been gone for two decades and a neighborhood she had lived in for half a year, almost sixty years earlier, and she got both of them right.

The house on Norwood is still standing. Somebody lives in it. There is no plaque, no sign, no line on a walking tour, and the people who drive past it dropping a kid at Sevier are not thinking about 1922 or 1988.

Which is about right. That address had already done the interesting thing before the Bushes ever saw it. Twelve houses, ten days, sold at cost to the people who worked here.

Everything after that is just a good horseshoe game.

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A few things worth getting off your couch for:

Kingsport Farmers Market | Saturday, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. | 308 Clinchfield Street September is the good stretch, when the tomatoes and the late peppers overlap and the flowers are still coming. Go early or go home with whatever is left. Details

Scenic Planetarium Yoga | Friday, 10 a.m. | Bays Mountain Park An hour of yoga inside the planetarium dome while the projector runs a day from sunrise to stars. Ten people max, sixteen and up, twelve dollars, and it books out. Details

Last call at the water park | Through Monday | Kingsport Aquatic Center The outdoor water park stays open through Labor Day and then closes for a $1.5 million renovation. Indoor pools drain Saturday. If you were going one more time, this is the weekend. Details

Three outfits in this town doing the work. Pick one.

Holston Habitat for Humanity Headquartered on Greenwood Lane, building and repairing houses across the region alongside the families who will live in them. The ReStore at 750 East Main sells donated furniture, appliances, and building materials Tuesday through Saturday, and the proceeds go straight into the builds. Give

Meals on Wheels of Kingsport Started in 1972 by three Kingsport women who talked local churches into lending their kitchens. Cook teams still work out of First Presbyterian and Waverly Road Presbyterian, and volunteer drivers run 14 routes across the city every weekday. Drivers are the constant need. Details

Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Greater Tri-Cities Matching adult volunteers with kids ages 6 to 18 since 1985, across Sullivan, Hawkins, Carter, and Washington counties. The ask is a few hours a month, and the part that actually matters is coming back the next month. Details

2277 Rock Springs Road | 5 bed, 2 bath

Speaking of front porches.

Twelve acres off Rock Springs, with a creek running across the front of the property and a bridge over it. The driveway runs past fenced pasture and rolling ground to an all-brick one-level house with twin curved staircases framing the porch. Inside, an open plan with a brick fireplace and built-ins in the living room, shaker cabinets and granite in the kitchen, and two pantries. Five bedrooms split three and two across the wings, with an oversized laundry room and a mudroom on the far side. The carport has tongue-and-groove ceilings and an EV charger.

Out back it turns into a different property. A 20 by 40 in-ground pool, a hot tub, a fire pit, and a covered pavilion set up for outdoor dining. Past the pool, a barn with concrete floors, power, water, four stalls, and its own rocking-chair front porch. There is an upper level in it. There is also a chicken coop, a hay barn, and another outbuilding.

New roof, new windows, new flooring, new fencing, new concrete driveway, new pool liner and decking, underground utilities. Somebody spent real money here before listing it. And it is a straight shot to both I-26 and I-81.

See the full listing at sellstateline.com.

What do you think they're asking for 2277 Rock Springs Road

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SPONSORED BY SELLING STATELINE

Selling Stateline is a team of REALTORS with 10 years of experience across Tennessee and Virginia, bringing five times the personality, expertise, and heart to help Tri-Cities families buy, sell, and invest in the place they call home. sellingstateline.com

Every week this newsletter lands in the inbox of Model Citizens who chose to put it there. No algorithm decided it for them. No feed buried it under somebody's vacation photos. They opened it because they want to know what is happening in this town.

That is a different thing than reach. Reach is a number you rent. This is attention, and it belongs to people who live here, shop here, hire here, and vote here.

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That's it for this week. Thanks for trusting me with your inbox. Let's tell some stories.

Talk soon,

Ryan