Dolly Parton, 80, died Tuesday after a battle with cancer, leaving behind a billion-dollar tourism empire rooted in her rural Tennessee hometown.
The country music legend passed away at her home, her publicist confirmed, drawing an immediate outpouring of grief from fans who began converging on the theme park she built in Pigeon Forge to honor her memory. Sevier County Mayor Larry Waters spoke to The Post Thursday about the economic transformation Parton engineered through sheer determination and hometown pride.
“Dollywood was really the catalyst that has allowed our area to take off,” Waters said. “Her promotion of the area all over the world — you can’t buy publicity like that.”
“Everywhere she went, she talked about her home and how beautiful it was here, and how great the people were,” he added. “That means so much to us.”
Parton’s path from poverty to international fame never severed her connection to Sevier County, where she was born in 1946 in a one-room cabin with no running water or electricity. Her father, an illiterate farmer and laborer, raised a large family under conditions typical of the depressed rural community that would later become the inspiration for her most beloved songs.
Rather than retreating to Hollywood glamour, Parton invested her music fortune in her birthplace, purchasing the existing Silver Dollar City theme park in 1986 and rechristening it Dollywood. She staffed it with locals and personally curated every detail of the down-home experience, from traditional Appalachian architecture to the very board-by-board recreation of her childhood cabin that serves as the park’s emotional centerpiece.
“I can’t imagine how they had so many people in that little house,” Parton’s niece Jennifer said Thursday. “They really had to get along.”
“I was 12 when Dollywood took over from Silver Dollar City, so I remember that,” Jennifer added. “It has changed the community quite a lot. We get lot of traffic now.”
That traffic has exploded into approximately 4 million annual visitors to Dollywood alone, with another 21 million tourists drawn to Sevier County overall thanks to Parton’s relentless global promotion of her home region. The economic ripple effects are staggering: the park generates roughly $2 billion for local businesses and stands as the county’s largest employer with about 4,000 jobs during peak season.
“That’s a positive economic impact from the dream that our dreamer-in-chief had,” said Dollywood president Eugene Naughton.
“She did a great job to help the whole town grow,” he added.
Eric Hicks, a 44-year-old oilfield worker from Virginia, loaded his wife and two of their children into a vehicle and drove to Tennessee within a day of Parton’s death announcement. He joined the growing crowd of mourners already lining up at Dollywood’s entrance gates, where cards and flowers accumulated rapidly. A moment of silence was held at the park around midday Wednesday, while downtown Sevierville saw additional tributes surround Parton’s statue outside the County Courthouse.
“We made the decision after she passed away, we was definitely gonna come,” Hicks said. “I feel like she was somebody that America don’t particularly have anymore.”
“She was somebody that knowed how to work hard, knowed how to accomplish things, and that’s just something that America lacks now,” he added.
Hicks spoke from personal experience about Parton’s generosity. All five of his children grew up reading books from her Imagination Library, the charitable program that mails free monthly books to children from birth through kindergarten regardless of family income.
“We lack people in this country that can come up from a small town with no money and learn and progress,” Hicks said. “Even though you get sent back, you’re able to move on forward and accomplish something. That’s something you just don’t see anymore.”
Don Gibson, 65, a deputy with the Sevier County Sheriff’s Office standing guard outside the courthouse, reflected on the decades of transformation he had witnessed.
“She knew how tough it was in Sevier County before our tourism grew and she wanted to give jobs to our families,” Gibson said. “And she certainly has, she kept her word. Miss Dolly was a real friend to Sevier County, she never forgot where she was from.”
Dollywood is expected to remain open as fans continue traveling to pay their respects at the park Parton built.