On a Saturday in October, there is hardly any traffic when you drive into Pigeon Forge. RVs from Ohio, minivans from Georgia, and pickup trucks with out-of-state license plates are all slowly moving in the same general direction, past the go-kart courses, outlet stores, and pancake houses that have proliferated along Parkway like a particular type of American plenty. A park that most people outside of Tennessee couldn’t have found on a map forty years ago is visible from the highway at the end of that crawl. This was done by Dollywood. Mostly, but not totally by itself.
Before Dolly Parton came, the land had a life. It debuted as Rebel Railroad in 1961, a little attraction with a Wild West theme and a coal-fired steam engine that undoubtedly made great sense at the time. Eventually, the Herschend family gained control and renamed it Silver Dollar City. The 1982 World’s Fair, which was held in nearby Knoxville, gave it a slight boost. There weren’t waves of visitors. The park was still mostly a local attraction, the kind of place you would go once as a child and just vaguely recall as an adult.
Then came 1986. Dolly Parton, who is already one of the biggest names in country music and recently starred in films like 9 to 5 and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, teamed up with Herschend Family Entertainment to purchase a portion of the park and put her name on it. In the first year, attendance doubled. That’s what happened when a real superstar with real Appalachian roots joined herself to a place she could truly claim as her own; it’s neither a marketing estimate nor a rounded figure. Rides weren’t the only reason people came. Unusually for a theme park, they were looking for something meaningful.
What came next wasn’t a tale of star power coasting. The DreamMore Resort and Spa, the Lightning Rod and Tennessee Tornado coasters, the expansion into the nearby Splash Country water park, and, most recently, the HeartSong Lodge, a massive lodge development intended to keep guests on site for several nights rather than driving home after sundown, are all examples of Dollywood’s constant and ambitious investment. It wasn’t a coincidental change from a day vacation location to a multi-day resort. It was intentional and altered the region’s economic calculations.
Alongside Dollywood, Sevier County’s tourism corridor, which runs through Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, and Sevierville, expanded in ways that are difficult to completely understand. The entire infrastructure—hotels, eateries, escape rooms, distilleries, outlet stores, and axe-throwing venues—grew to accommodate the year-round influx of tourists drawn by Dollywood. The seasonal ceiling that kept many mountain tourism locations quiet throughout the winter was broken in part by the Smoky Mountain Christmas festival, which is now one of the park’s defining events. November and December also saw an increase in visitors, and the local businesses made the necessary adjustments.
One important aspect of the Dollywood approach that is sometimes overlooked is that it was successful because it was targeted. The park didn’t make an effort to compete on Disney’s terms. Appalachian craft, mountain music, local cuisine, and a celebrity with a biographical rather than contractual link to the area were all heavily featured. It was defensible precisely because of its distinctiveness, which also continues to attract tourists who have already seen Orlando and are looking for something less staged.
Dollywood is currently the biggest employment in Pigeon Forge and the most popular ticketed tourist destination in Tennessee. It’s unclear if that trajectory will continue at the same rate because the travel industry is more competitive than it has ever been and customer travel habits change in unexpected ways. However, both the basis and the associated economic weight are genuine. In 1961, a steam train attraction developed into a $1.8 billion yearly engine. That is not an accident.
