The Titanic on the Parkway

Rising out of the parkway ahead is something that stops first time visitors cold, a great ocean liner, half the size of the real thing, apparently sailing through the Smoky Mountains. This is the Titanic Museum Attraction, and it opened on the eighth of April, two thousand ten, deliberately close to the anniversary of the ship's sinking. The replica is built to one half scale and set in a pool of water to suggest the ship at sea, and it cost something like twenty-five million dollars to build.

Inside, it bills itself as the largest permanent Titanic museum in the world, with around twenty galleries and roughly four hundred genuine artifacts recovered or connected to the disaster. There is a re creation of the ship's famous Grand Staircase, said to have cost a million dollars alone. Visitors are handed a boarding pass bearing the name of a real passenger or crew member, and only at the end do they learn whether that person lived or died when the ship went down in the North Atlantic in nineteen twelve, taking more than fifteen hundred lives.

It is an unlikely thing to find in landlocked East Tennessee, a monument to a shipwreck a thousand miles from any ocean. But that is the parkway's genius, taking the whole world's stories and parking them where twelve million mountain visitors will drive right past.