Dollywood, and the Girl From Locust Ridge
Near Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
The theme park glittering in front of you carries the name of a woman who was born a few ridges away, the fourth of twelve children, in a one room cabin near the headwaters of the Little Pigeon River. Dolly Rebecca Parton arrived on January nineteenth, nineteen forty-six. Her father was a sharecropper, and the family story goes that he paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal.
She grew up on Locust Ridge, dirt poor and rich in music, and the coat her mother stitched from donated fabric scraps became one of the most beloved songs in American country music. But the park itself is older than Dolly. It opened in nineteen sixty-one as Rebel Railroad, a small tourist attraction built around a steam train, with a Civil War theme timed to the war's hundredth anniversary.
By the mid nineteen sixties it had become Goldrush Junction, all Wild West. In nineteen seventy the owner of the Cleveland Browns football team bought it. Then, in the mid nineteen seventies, the Herschend family of Branson, Missouri took it over and renamed it Silver Dollar City Tennessee, after their Missouri park.
And then Dolly came home. In nineteen eighty-six she bought a half share, partnering with the Herschends, and reopened the park as Dollywood. She said she had always dreamed that if she made it big, she would come back to her part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area.
It worked. Attendance more than doubled in that first Dollywood season, past one million guests. Today the park draws more than three million people a year, making it the most visited ticketed attraction in the state of Tennessee and one of Sevier County's largest employers.
The rides came in waves. Wild Eagle, the first wing coaster in the United States, in twenty twelve. Lightning Rod.
The Wildwood Grove expansion. A resort called DreamMore. Through all of it, the woman who could have retired to Los Angeles or Nashville chose instead to plant her fortune back in the hills that made her, turning the poorest county she knew into a place the whole world drives to see.
