Margaret Ripley Wolfe

Appalachian entrepreneur and promoter of the model city of Kingsport, J. Fred Johnson was born on June 25, 1874, in Hillsville, Virginia, the son of J. Lee Johnson and Mary Pierce Early Johnson. A nineteenth-century American value system heavily imbued…

Kingsport was the first economically diversified, professionally planned, and privately financed city in twentieth-century America. Neither an Appalachian hamlet nor a company town, Kingsport developed as a self-proclaimed "All-American City." Affected by mergers, buyouts, and shifting economic trends, contemporary Kingsport…

During the interlude marked by the end of the depression of the 1890s and the entry of the United States into the First World War in 1917, Tennesseans as well as other Americans entered the twentieth century. Embracing reformism at…