Kingsport, Tennessee, sits about twenty miles from Bristol, and in 1917 it was re-chartered with a specific ambition: to be built right. City planner John Nolen organized it into deliberate districts — commerce, churches, housing, industry — and laid in some of the earliest traffic circles in the United States. The result was one of the early American examples of a planned garden city, a place where the relationship between work and daily life was designed before the first shovel turned. That downtown grid still stands, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. For a traveler moving through the Appalachian highlands, Kingsport is a useful counterpoint to the organic, accidental growth of most American cities — proof that someone, once, tried to think the whole thing through before it got away from them.
