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Welcome back. Glad you're here.
Everybody around here can tell you the Holston Army Ammunition Plant is out on Stone Drive. What I could not have told you before this week is what the numbers coming out of that place looked like between 1942 and 1945. They are bigger than I expected, and bigger than the version of Kingsport's war story I grew up hearing.
In today's post:
What Kingsport actually did in the war, and the plant that never stopped
Three things this weekend, starting with ten volleyball teams from seven states
Business Spotlight: Tennessee Hills, eleven generations and a Civil War salt house
Quick Hits, including the Dr. Enuf cake recipe you did not know existed
Student of the Week starts next issue, and I need nominations
Neighbors Helping Neighbors: United Way of Greater Kingsport kicks off the campaign
House Hunch: 4017 Glen Alpine Road, presented by Selling Stateline
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WHAT KINGSPORT ACTUALLY DID IN THE WAR
If you have driven West Stone Drive, you have driven past it. Long fence, guard shack, signs that do not invite follow-up questions. Everybody in this town knows the Holston Army Ammunition Plant is out there. Plenty of families have somebody who worked it. The plant is not a secret and never has been.
What gets lost is the size of what happened inside it.
Ask around about Kingsport and World War II and you will usually get the Eastman story. Tennessee Eastman ran Y-12 at Oak Ridge, and that connection is real and documented and worth telling. It is also not the whole ledger.
By 1944, Kingsport led the world in wartime ordnance production.
Not a contributor to the effort. The largest producer on the planet, sitting on the Holston River across Sullivan and Hawkins counties.
The Holston Ordnance Works was established in July 1942. Construction began that year at an estimated cost of nearly $77 million and was not completely finished until January 1944, which means the place was running full tilt before it was done being built. Tennessee Eastman managed it. The product was Composition B, used in detonators and as the bursting charge in bombs and artillery shells. On its own the primary ingredient was too unstable to move. Blended, it became something you could ship across an ocean.
What made Holston matter was not volume alone. It was the first large-scale plant anywhere to run the Bachmann process, and the people here did not simply run it. They rebuilt it, replacing an expensive batch operation with a continuous slurry process, then worked out better cooling and packaging methods on top of that. Ten production lines. About 6,000 acres. 465 buildings.
For a stretch of the war, the world's supply came from here.
At its peak the plant employed nearly 7,000 people, and 40 percent of them were women. In 1943 Tennessee Eastman and the Holston works were awarded the Army-Navy "E" for wartime production. Between 1942 and 1945, at a facility built for exactly one purpose, there were three work-related deaths. None of them happened the way you would assume.
Thousands of people, most of them new to the work, a lot of them women who had never held an industrial job, doing the most dangerous manufacturing in America for three years running, and the plant lost three of them.
It was not free for the town. Heavy construction and thousands of incoming workers displaced families and created a housing shortage Kingsport was not built to absorb. Most people put up with it because there was a war on and complaining felt small.
Production stopped in 1945. The plant went to standby and spent a few quiet years making fertilizer, which is the strangest sentence in this whole story. It was reactivated in 1949 as the Cold War set in, renamed Holston Army Ammunition Plant in the early 1960s, and it has run ever since. It has supported every major American conflict since World War II.
It is still running right now. BAE Systems has been the operating contractor since 1999, and in December 2023 the Army awarded the company another 10-year base contract with a ceiling value of $8.8 billion to keep operating the site. Plant A sits on 120 acres inside Kingsport. Plant B covers 5,900 acres out in Hawkins County. The two are connected by rail. Holston remains the country's primary domestic source for what it makes, which is a polite way of saying there is no backup.
That fence on Stone Drive fronts a working plant in its ninth decade, still doing the job it was built to do, for a country that has not had a year where it did not need it.
Eighty-four years. Same river, same work.
Drive it a little slower this weekend.
STUDENT OF THE WEEK: Nominations Needed
Starting next issue, one Kingsport-area student gets this spot every week.
Not the valedictorian by default, and not whoever the school office puts forward. The kid who runs the sound board for every assembly and never gets named. The one who taught herself welding in the ag shop. The sophomore who has not missed a day since sixth grade.
Teachers, coaches, band directors, bus drivers, parents, and students themselves can nominate. Reply to this email with the student's name, their school and grade, and the specific thing they did. Specific matters. "Good kid" tells me nothing. "Rebuilt the concession stand freezer over the summer so the booster club would not have to buy one" tells me everything.
Interviews are conducted with a parent or guardian present.
Send me somebody.
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WHATS HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND
Three things worth knowing this weekend
Milligan Mountain Madness Volleyball | Fri 12:00 PM to 9:00 PM, through Saturday | Tribe Athletic Complex Nineteenth year for this one, and Visit Kingsport is co-hosting with Milligan University for the first time. Ten teams from seven states in town for it. Details
Peter Pan, FHG Productions | Fri and Sat 7:00 PM, Sun 3:00 PM | 2152 Hawthorne St Closing weekend for the FHG run, with a sensory-friendly performance Saturday at 2:00 PM. Pirates, pixie dust, the whole thing. Details
Whisky Trail at MeadowView | Sat 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM | MeadowView Conference Resort A Calumet Farm bourbon tasting built as a four-course pairing dinner, with the menu written around the pours rather than the other way around. Details
BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT: Tennessee Hills Distillery
Stephen Callahan started Tennessee Hills in Jonesborough inside the Salt House, a building put up in the 1840s that did exactly what the name says during the Civil War. The company's own line is eleven generations of distilling, methods carried over from Irish forebears, and they lean on that hard. Locally grown yellow dent corn and barley, stone ground in an antique mill. Small batches. Copper stills the crew built themselves.
That is the part that would be easy to write off as marketing if the operation had stayed small. It did not.
In 2022 the state announced a $21.3 million expansion into Sullivan County, putting a new headquarters on roughly nine acres off Highway 11W in Bristol with 45 jobs projected over five years. The building runs 35,000 square feet and houses an automated distillery, a museum covering Tennessee whiskey, NASCAR and music, a brewery, and a barbecue kitchen. They call it a Brewstillery and claim it is the largest privately owned one in North America. Last year they announced a fourth site in Johnson County at the old Watauga Lake Winery property.
For Kingsport readers, the closest one is Bristol, which is the same 11W that runs past the plant in the story above. Not a coincidence worth reading into. Just a highway that has been carrying this region's industry for a hundred years.
Free tastings at the Jonesborough location, spirits and beer and food at Bristol. tennesseehills.com
NEIGHBORS HELPING NEIGHBORS: United Way of Greater Kingsport
United Way of Greater Kingsport On Tuesday they hosted the regional campaign kickoff at MeadowView, bringing in the United Ways of Bristol TN/VA, East Tennessee Highlands, Greene County, Hawkins County and Southwest Virginia. The combined regional goal announced was $6.25 million, funding health, early literacy, youth programs and financial stability work. Money raised through each local campaign stays in that campaign's region. Give
HOUSE HUNCH: 4017 Glen Alpine Road
4017 Glen Alpine Road | 4 bed, 3.5 bath
Twelve acres, no city taxes, and a flag plaza that lights itself.
The house is all brick, roughly 3,500 square feet, sitting on about 12 acres with sunrise and mountain views out the front windows. The flag plaza out front is on a timer, so it stages itself after dark whether anybody is home or not. Inside, a winding staircase wrapped in windows pulls light down through the middle of the house. Main level is open, built for having people over, with a breakfast nook in a bay window and a pantry big enough to matter.
Upstairs, the primary suite runs large with tray ceilings, double vanities, a walk-in shower and a walk-in closet. Three more bedrooms and the remaining baths give you room for guests, kids, an office, or all three at once.
Out back is newer Trex decking and a sandbox. A detached two-car garage with newer doors handles parking or overflow storage.
Then there is the shed. Lit, wired, and running 80-amp electrical service. That is enough power to run a welder, a lift, a kiln, or a small business, sitting out on 12 private acres where nobody is going to complain about the noise.
Full listing at sellstateline.com.
What do you think they're asking for 4017 Glen Alpine 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
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
What Is The Listing Price
COMMUNITY PARTNERS
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.
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Community Partners get named in front of that audience every single week. Not in a wall of banners, because we cap the whole thing at ten businesses and keep every category exclusive. One contractor. One realtor. One coffee shop. When yours is taken, it's taken.
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WHAT I NEED FROM YOU
This newsletter works best when it's a conversation. If you know a story that needs to be told, a person doing something interesting, or a place in Kingsport that matters to you, send it my way. Every documentary, every feature, every post starts with someone saying "you should look into this."
That's it for this week. Thanks for trusting me with your inbox. Let's tell some stories.
Talk soon,
Ryan