La Follette's Old Post Office Almost Got Sold in 2022. Third Saturdays Still Belong to It.

Drive past 119 S. Tennessee Avenue on any third Saturday of the month and you will likely see cars parked two and three deep along the front of the building, doors propped open at 5:30, and a line of people waiting to pay five dollars for a folding chair inside a 1937 post office. Nobody in that line is thinking about zoning ordinances or council votes. They are there for the Postmark Jamboree, the monthly bluegrass night that has run out of this building for over a decade.

What most of them do not know, and what does not show up on any tourism page listing La Follette's things to do, is that the LaFollette City Council voted in 2022 to declare this building surplus property and put it up for sale. The show almost lost its home. It is still running because a handful of volunteers kept showing up to council meetings with grant checks and a folding-chair nonprofit, not because anyone guaranteed them the building would stay theirs.

If you live near downtown, in The Point or anywhere else in walking distance, that distinction matters more than the calendar listing does.

What a Third Saturday Actually Looks Like

The format has stayed consistent for years. Doors open at 5:30 p.m., the show runs 6 to 8, and tickets are five dollars at the door. Tony Branam serves as MC, and the house band, Special Delivery, anchors the lineup alongside whatever local musicians are on the bill that month. Seasonal versions of the show rotate in, including a Bluegrass October installment and a Christmas Jamboree with two hours of holiday music.

Before the music starts, the building doubles as a market. The Artisans Co-op sells handmade jewelry, quilts, and locally canned preserves, with one rule that keeps it genuinely local: to sell there, your work has to be handmade and you have to be a Campbell County resident. Parking is free on the street in front of the building and in the city lot behind it, though regulars know not to park on the north side, since that lot belongs to Russell Tower residents.

None of this is unusual for a small-town arts venue. What is unusual is how close it came to not existing.

A Building That Was Empty for Five Years Before Anyone Had a Plan

The post office at 119 S. Tennessee Avenue went up in 1937 with Treasury Department funds during the WPA era, the kind of art deco civic building that small East Tennessee towns don't build anymore. When the USPS opened a new facility for La Follette around 2008, the old building sat empty. Nobody had a use for it for years. It eventually went to auction in 2013, and the City of LaFollette bought it back from that buyer that same November, which meant the town owned a vacant historic post office with no clear plan for what came next.

The plan came from two people: Jo Anne McCloud Myers and Karen Cumorich, who organized a children's Christmas event inside the old sorting room in 2014, complete with a mini post office where kids could write letters to Santa. That one-time event became a name, then a monthly jamboree, then in April 2017 a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Postmark LaFollette. By 2020, the center had earned a Region Strong award from the Cumberland Gap Region Tourism Association for its community programming, and it had drawn Smithsonian-affiliated exhibits into a building that used to just sort mail.

That track record is exactly what made the 2022 fight so strange to watch.

The Year the City Almost Let It Go

Postmark never had a formal lease. For years it operated on informal permission while the city covered utilities and Postmark covered its own programming. As the arrangement dragged on, proposals went back and forth without resolution. At one point Postmark's representative floated a 24-month lease at zero dollars a month. Later, in a written proposal to the council, the nonprofit offered $500 a month, framed as rent or utilities at the city's discretion, in exchange for a formal lease and right of first refusal if the city ever decided to sell. One council member argued the building, which he estimated at over $200,000 in value, was worth $1,000 a month or more.

In that same proposal, Postmark pointed out it had already raised more than $115,000 in grant funding that went straight into building repairs, and that its co-op had generated over $12,000 in sales for 25 local artists. The nonprofit asked the council to choose people over profit. The council did not take up that framing. Members voted unanimously to declare the old post office surplus property and put it on the market, closing out months of back and forth without a lease in Postmark's favor.

That vote is a matter of public record, covered by the LaFollette Press at the time. It is also the part of this story that never makes it into a visitor guide.

Still Running, Without a Deed in Hand

Here is the part that makes this worth knowing if you live nearby: the building was never actually sold. As of 2025, the Living New Deal historic sites database, which tracks WPA and Treasury-era public buildings nationally, still lists the La Follette post office as an active local arts center. As recently as this spring, area visitor guides confirmed the Postmark Jamboree was still happening every third Saturday, same address, same format.

Nothing in the public record shows that the surplus designation was ever reversed or that a long-term lease was ever finalized. The most accurate way to describe the current arrangement is that it has continued, year after year, without the kind of permanent protection most people assume a decade-old community institution has already secured. The volunteers who run Postmark are still, in effect, running a monthly bluegrass show inside a building the city could decide to sell again.

What This Means If You Live Near Here

If you live in The Point or anywhere else within a short drive of downtown La Follette, the practical takeaway is simple: go while it is running, and do not assume it will always be there in its current form. Small towns lose these kinds of institutions quietly, usually not through a dramatic closure but through a lease that quietly doesn't get renewed or a council vote that goes the other way next time.

It is also a reminder of something less obvious about buying into a place like this. The things that make a small East Tennessee downtown feel distinct, a WPA post office turned arts center, a $5 bluegrass night, a co-op with a residency requirement, are almost never guaranteed by anything more permanent than a handful of people showing up to meetings and grant applications year after year. That is part of what you are actually buying into when you choose a neighborhood like The Point, not just proximity to a lake or a highway interchange, but proximity to a community that keeps rebuilding its own institutions by hand.

If you are curious what that looks like day to day, or you are weighing whether The Point or another Norris Lake corridor neighborhood fits how you actually want to live, that is exactly the kind of local detail our team at Alco Builders & Realty can walk you through. Schedule a consultation and we will talk through the neighborhood, not just the listing.