The Iron Forge That Named a Town
Near Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
The name Pigeon Forge sounds almost accidental, but both halves are literal. Start with the forge. Around eighteen seventeen, a man named Isaac Love built an iron forge here on the west fork of the Little Pigeon River, on land his father in law, a Revolutionary War veteran named Mordecai Lewis, had claimed with a land grant.
The river turned a water wheel, the wheel drove a heavy trip hammer said to weigh some five hundred pounds, and a bloomery furnace smelted brown iron ore hauled down from the Smoky foothills by ox drawn wagon. Out of it came iron bars, farm tools, and building hardware for settlers across the region, in a mountain frontier where a working ironworks was a genuine engine of civilization. Isaac Love eventually owned thousands of acres.
Isaac Love also built the gristmill you can still visit today, and his son William would, in eighteen forty-one, name the local post office. Now the other half of the name. The Little Pigeon River was named for the passenger pigeon, a bird that once roosted here in flocks so vast they darkened the sky, drawn to the beechnuts along the banks.
By nineteen fourteen the passenger pigeon was extinct, gone forever. So the town's name is a small monument to two things that no longer exist here. A frontier iron forge, long dismantled, and a bird that will never fly over this river again.
