By Brooke Stevenson
brooke@seymourherald.com    
    A long-time Seymour resident recently reminisced about how the area has changed over the years.
    Earl Ramsey is nearly 80 years old and has lived in Seymour for 25 years and has lived in Sevier County his entire life.
    “There has been a lot of change but I don’t really get out and socialize,” Ramsey said. “Over the last 25 years Seymour has become a bedroom community for Knoxville.
    “It is really building up and now there are a lot more businesses opening up.”
    Ramsey added that when he moved to Seymour 25 years ago there weren’t any banks, supermarkets or drug stores.
    “There are a lot more infrastructures being built,” he said.
    Before moving to Seymour Ramsey lived about a mile from the Fort Sanders Hospital in Sevierville.
    “My family has been in living in the general area for about seven generations,” Ramsey said. “I worked at the Alcoa Aluminum plant and we moved to Seymour because it was closer to where I worked.”
    Ramsey’s forefathers came to East Tennessee before Knoxville was even founded as a city in 1786 and one of his relatives was a surveyor who had part in laying out the original streets in Knoxville, he said.
    “I’ve lived here all my life in Sevier County, except when I was in the military,” Ramsey said. “I was in Korea in 1951 and spent a year and three days there and that was a year and two days too long.”
    When asked what the future of Seymour looked like Ramsey said, “I don’t know what the future will hold but right now it don’t look good. The people that are supposed to be changing the world aren’t doing anything.”
    He believes that a large part of the problem is that the goods that Americans need and use aren’t being manufactured in America.
    “All of the factories have been moved to other countries and we have such a national debt that it will never be paid,” Ramsey said.
    He added that he has seen the state of the economy negatively effect local businesses.
    “I went to a sale in town on Saturday and the store was going out of business. The store didn’t bring in a fraction of the business as it should have brought,” he said.

    

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