Dollywood and Dolly Parton's Literacy Campaign

Dolly Parton was born in a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge in Sevier County, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, paid the doctor who delivered her with a bag of cornmeal because the family had no money. She grew up in a hollow without electricity. She moved to Nashville the day after she finished high school in nineteen sixty-four.

The theme park in Pigeon Forge opened as Rebel Railroad in nineteen sixty-one, later renamed Silver Dollar City. In nineteen eighty-six, Dolly Parton became a co-owner and gave it her name. Dollywood has since become one of the most visited theme parks in the southeastern United States, a combination of roller coasters, Appalachian craft demonstrations, and gospel music that is designed around the culture of the mountains rather than against it.

What gets less attention than the rides is the Imagination Library. Parton started the program in nineteen ninety-five in Sevier County, mailing one free age-appropriate book per month to every child enrolled from birth through age five. The program spread across Tennessee, then across the United States, then internationally. By the mid-two-thousand-twenties, the Imagination Library had distributed more than two hundred million books to children in multiple countries, at no cost to their families.

The reason she started it is not complicated. Her father never learned to read. She has said she built the program because of him. The mountain she came from, in the most literal sense, now funds one of the largest childhood literacy programs in the world.