In 1986, Dolly Parton was as famous as an American entertainer can be. She could have put her name on a park in Los Angeles, Orlando, or Las Vegas. She put it on about 150 acres in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a few miles down the mountain from the ridge where she grew up.
Her reasoning was never complicated. Sevier County was where her people were, and Sevier County needed work. Partnering with the Herschend family, she rebuilt the existing Silver Dollar City park and reopened it on May 3, 1986, as Dollywood — a park with Appalachian craftspeople working in the open, gospel and bluegrass on the stages, a replica of her childhood cabin, and food you would recognize from a church supper. Forty years on it draws around three million guests a season and is the largest employer in the county, with several thousand people on the payroll. That was never a happy side effect. That was the entire plan.
She kept building. Dolly’s Splash Country opened in 2001, the DreamMore Resort in 2015, the five-acre Wildwood Grove in 2019. This past March the park opened its 41st season with the I Will Always Love You Festival, and just four days ago — on August 21 — NightFlight Expedition finally opened inside Wildwood Grove, the largest attraction investment in Dollywood history, an indoor coaster and raft ride built around the synchronous fireflies that light up these mountains every June. She lived to see it open.
She also treated opening day as a personal obligation. Every spring she came back to Pigeon Forge to launch the season, give a keynote, and lead the parade with the crowd pressed in on both sides. She did it this year on March 13, a year after losing her husband Carl and after a run of health trouble that had pushed her Las Vegas residency dates back. She told the crowd from the stage that she had been “worn down and worn out.” Then, to a standing ovation, she said, “I’m not done yet” — and went out and led the parade anyway.
She died Tuesday in Nashville at 80. The park is still there at the foot of the mountains she wrote all those songs about, and so is everything around it: the same hollers, the same haze sitting on the ridgelines at dusk, the same country that produced her and that she spent forty years pointing the rest of the world toward.