Bobby Joe Adamson grew up as one of 12 kids on a 50-acre farm in Ooltewah where his sharecropper father, Charlie Barney Adamson, grew cotton, corn and sweet potatoes.
“We was poor, but we didn’t know it,” says Adamson, a real estate developer.
So he felt good on the day he put up a brick sign at Adamson Estates, the upscale subdivision that he built in the 1990s on the land his father share-cropped.
“I said, ‘Dad, I got your name up,'” he remembers. “I shed a few tears.”
Staff Photo by Dan Henry/Chattanooga Times Free Press – 10/29/12. Bobby Adamson’s, owner of Adamson Development LLC, stands outside of his neighborhood, Adamson Place, which his construction company built nearly two decades ago. That was a milestone for Adamson, who began his career in construction at age 17 as a bricklayer after he attended Booker T. Washington School, a black-only Hamilton County high school.