Why Kingsport Is Called the Model City

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Kingsport is called the Model City because it was planned on purpose, before most of it existed, by people trying to build a better kind of industrial town. A New York banker and his partners hired a professional city planner to lay out where the factories, homes, churches, and shops would go. They wrote a modern city charter with help from municipal reformers in New York. Then they went out and recruited the industry to fill it.

Margaret Ripley Wolfe, the historian who wrote Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City, describes Kingsport as the first city in twentieth-century America that was professionally planned, privately financed, and economically diversified from the start.

That's the short answer. Here's the longer one.

People were building boats on this stretch of the Holston long before anyone drew up a plan. A boatyard town called Christianville took shape along the river in 1802, and Kingsport was first chartered in 1822. The Civil War ended that run. After the Battle of Kingsport in 1864, the town lost its charter and spent the next four decades struggling.

The Model City started with a railroad. George L. Carter of Hillsville, Virginia, the driving force behind the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway, saw the potential for an industrial city at Kingsport. Then Carter ran into money trouble.

Around 1914, John B. Dennis of Blair and Company, a New York banking firm, stepped in. As Blair's representative, Dennis bought roughly 6,355 acres in Sullivan and Hawkins counties from the Carter Coal Company. The next year he organized the Kingsport Improvement Corporation and brought in J. Fred Johnson, Carter's brother-in-law, to run the promotion on the ground.

Dennis had the money and the vision. Johnson had the practical sense to make it work. He spent the rest of his life on the project, became known as the Father of Kingsport, and by his death in 1944 had served for almost thirty years as what Wolfe called "a one-man chamber of commerce."

Dennis and Johnson took advice from experts, but they never handed over the decisions. For the physical layout, they hired John Nolen, a city planner and landscape architect from Cambridge, Massachusetts. For homes and public buildings, they brought in architects including Clinton MacKenzie, Thomas Hastings, and Grosvenor Atterbury. Lola Anderson, a Cornell-trained landscape designer, handled landscaping and gardening. She later married Dennis.

Nolen's plan sorted the town into areas for industry, commerce, churches, and housing, and Kingsport's traffic circles were among the earliest in the United States. The hub is Church Circle, ringed by four brick church buildings. Downtown runs along Broad Street from Church Circle at one end to the old train depot at the other.

The developers also decided against a company town. The Kingsport Improvement Corporation sold land and pushed home ownership.

The city's government was planned as carefully as its streets. Lawyers for the Kingsport Improvement Corporation drafted the articles of incorporation, sent them to several southern authorities for review, and consulted the Bureau of Municipal Research in New York.

When Kingsport incorporated in 1917, it became the first city in Tennessee to run under a city manager, a professional administrator hired to run the city's departments. Kingsport still uses that form of government.

The schools got the same treatment. The city brought in Columbia University to help design its school system, a story we told in We Hired Columbia University To Build Our Schools.

A planned industrial city needs industry, and recruiting it was the part that would make or break the whole idea. Johnson spent years at it.

The biggest catch came in 1920. During World War I, a company had started building a wood distillation plant in Kingsport to make methanol under a government contract, then walked away when the war ended. Johnson went looking for a buyer. George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, wanted his own supply of chemicals for photography. He sent a delegation, came to see Kingsport himself in July 1920, and bought 35 acres and the half-built plant. That became Tennessee Eastman, today's Eastman Chemical Company, still headquartered in Kingsport.

Dennis also chaired the board of the Kingsport Press, which grew into one of the largest bookmakers in the world (more on that here). In 1924 he recruited Borden Mills from Massachusetts. When the Great Depression hit, Tennessee Eastman became the city's largest employer, and Kingsport became something rare in the 1930s: an industrial city that was still growing.

Because it was professionally planned before it was built. John Nolen's plan sorted the town into areas for industry, commerce, churches, and housing, and the city adopted a city-manager charter when it incorporated in 1917.

City planner John Nolen of Cambridge, Massachusetts, working for developers John B. Dennis and J. Fred Johnson.

Kingsport was first chartered in 1822 and chartered again as the modern city in 1917.

No. It was built to hold several industries, and its developers sold land and encouraged people to own their homes.

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