Bays Mountain Park

For as long as one can recall, Bays Mountain has always enjoyed a wonderful history of serving. While the Bays Mountain of decades past is very much different from the way we know it today, the common thread that strings each decade and generation together is service.

From the early 1800's through the early-to-mid 1900's, Bays Mountain provided for those families who settled on the mountain. The mountain provided settlers with land to farm, wood for building houses, a church and even a school. Obviously life was much different then, but relying on Bays Mountain to provide the resources, wildlife and harvest needed to survive and thrive was a given. It surely wasn't easy, as their were challenges provided by any mountainous terrain, but those families who did make the mountain there home, proudly did so. Many of their stories are wonderfully told in our Farmstead Museum.

In 1907, one of Kingsport's founders, J. Fred Johnson, began buying up land on Bays Mountain to create a lake to be used as a water source for fledgling Kingsport. By 1914 Johnson had purchased the roughly 1,200 acres that surrounded the watershed and sold it to Kingsport Waterworks Corporation who promptly began work in 1915 preparing to build the now iconic dam seen as visitors enter the common area atop Bays Mountain Park.

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