June 1997

Old CC&O Office Building in Johnson City

Ok, here we go again with a long, drawn out story. The CC&O had their offices in a building in the Carnegie section of Johnson City in the early part of the the 1900s. It was at Fairview and Centre Streets. Just across Centre Street was the Carnegie Hotel. This section of Johnson City was designed and laid out by Mr. Carnegie in hopes that it would become the new downtown section of Johnson City. Well, to make a long story just slightly shorter, it didn't. The Carnegie Hotel was supposedly a very nice 4 or 5 story hotel and served passengers from the Southern and the ET&WNC. It partially burned and was closed around 1910 and never reopened. Later, the building that the CC&O operated out of was bought by the Empire Furniture Co. They supposedly used the closed Carnegie Hotel for a warehouse.

This all leads to this photo, believe it or not. I went in the building that the CC&O had used which is part of the Vaughn Chair Co., a division of the Empire Furniture Co. and asked permission to look around and maybe shoot some photos. I asked one of the owners who guided me around about the building and its annex across what had been Centre Street (the street is closed off and the two buildings were connected with a covered connector structure). Well, he told me that this building had once been the Carnegie Hotel, and he pointed out this elaborate staircase (as garishly painted as it is), which I'll admit is too nice for a furniture company, and could be nice enough for a hotel, but it also could have been used in the old CC&O building. He also pointed out an elaborate brick archway with decorative carved limestone ends that was once on the entrance on Centre Street, but is now inside the connector. All this probably makes no sense, but I thought it very interesting, and I love a good mystery, almost as much as a bridge. And especially since all my old maps say that this building was the CC&O building and not the Carnegie Hotel. This is definitely the CC&O building, but parts of it seem too nice to be just offices. Some of the Carnegie Addition history is in John's Waite's Blue Ridge Stemwinder book for anyone interested in Johnson City history. There's also the book "Greater Johnson City" by Ray Stahl, that has many, many old photos. My educated guess is that this is the CC&O office building, and the Carnegie Hotel was razed and the Empire Co. put up another structure on the site for its manufacturing.