This was taken in 1976 or so, when a buddy of mine and I (both of us long-haired hippie types) loaded our cameras up with Tri-X film and went on a shoot in Gate City. I spotted this couple taking some, rather disapproving, note of my taking a picture of them.
I like to walk around the town just before dawn. Sometimes you get interesting pix.
Not only can Stu not spell, he has a misunderstanding of how the old Kingsport telephone numbers worked. (When I visited Kingsport as a child in 1956, I was amazed at the dial telephones. We still had the operator system in Morristown. I was such a rube.)
This was the Kayo Number 1 gas station on the corner of Industry Drive and Netherland Inn Road. It sat beside the Ward Feed facility (you can see the silos behind the station building) fronting on Netherland Inn Road. Both these buildings are long gone now, razed when the City put in the traffic circle. Surprisingly, the old Chuck’s Drive In building is still there, as part of a used car lot. Back in the ’60s, Chuck’s had the best burgers around.
It’s Jenkins KY Fire Dept’s old #3. Check me on the date. It’s hard to read the faded plate on the right side of the bumper. I looked on the ‘net and this looked like a ’47. Like I know fire trucks. Love to gaze upon them, though. They and the braves who manned them kept devastation at bay.
This is behind the former (long time ago) Intermountain Telephone Company (often referred to as the “Intermittent Telephone Company”) building in Kingsport. The arrow points to a basement entrance.
At first glance, it looks like it’s a person crouched over something. It looked that way to me when I happened on it and took the picture. But it’s not. It’s just a coat over a bag of trash, with just a little bit of a shoe in the background. Whew.
This is a frog. It’s part of a switch in Kingsport yard. It’s called a frog, I’m informed, because of its resemblance to a part of a horse’s hoof. Since I don’t know anything at all about horses, very little about frogs, and only a smattering about railroad technology, I’ll take their word for it.
This is on the highway between Elizabethton and Hampton TN. Just sitting there, glittering in the morning sun.
Feedback tells me this was an Army surplus store. Interesting sign, too.
I was out walking on a pleasant summer morning, just after dawn, when I saw this. The windows are steamed up from the early morning prep. I angled around until the sign hid the sun itself and let the light show through the windows. I had a paper route in downtown Kingsport not too long after this Pal’s was built in the late 50s. I delivered the Kingsport Times (the afternoon paper…the News was the morning edition) right after school, before supper. Several of my deliveries were on Shelby Street. The smell of the hamburgers (still the same today) would remind me how long it had been since I’d eaten.
This is in east Jenkins KY. We got a number of pix in a brief stop here.
I saw this in the former Miller Yard in Virginia. I don’t know what it means. It’s a little teddy bear tied to hollow tube that holds a tool the train guys use for something (I really know a lot about whatever it is I’m writing about….really). It’s all covered in coal dust.
I don’t know what the heck this thing is. I think it’s some sort of crusher, since it was at what used to be General Shale in Kingsport. I liked it because it had those large gears and because it was pink. Big, butch, pink machine. A trifecta.
Yep, saw this little skitterer while walking the rails in Southwest Virginia.
It does look a little like a long-necked bird with a curved and pointed beak, doesn’t it. It’s what’s left of a small tree. Ain’t nature fahcinating!
Coke ovens, in this configuration and in the beehive configuration, used to be thick on the ground around this area of Wise County. We’re near Pine Branch and these are a few of the 60 remaining derelict coke ovens…there used to be over 300 here, with railroad access, from around 1920 to about 1980. They were used to burn coal in the absence of oxygen to produce coke, which burns cleanly at high temperature. Catnip, as they say, for steel makers.
Uncle Bob's Pix 