The Parkway: A Farm Town Turned Boomtown
Near Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
The neon strip you are driving is one of the great tourism transformations in the American South. When the national park opened in the nineteen thirties, this was farm country. By one telling, Pigeon Forge had essentially zero tourism businesses at all.
People grew corn and tended livestock in the shadow of the mountains. The road changed everything. The Parkway, part of United States Route Four Forty-One, was paved through here in the nineteen fifties, and it turned Pigeon Forge into the accessible gateway to the Smokies, an easier landing spot than steep, hemmed in Gatlinburg further up the mountain.
Then came the deliberate boom. In the early nineteen eighties, boosted by the nineteen eighty-two World's Fair in nearby Knoxville and a local plan to court visitors with outlet malls, music theaters, and attractions, the town leaned all the way in. Dolly Parton's Dollywood opened in nineteen eighty-six and became the anchor the whole strip could grow around.
Today more than ten million visitors a year pour through, past pancake houses and go kart tracks and dinner theaters and mini golf courses stacked one after another. A place that once had nothing to sell but a view of the mountains reinvented itself, in the span of a single lifetime, into one of the most visited small towns in the country.
