As America remembers country music legend Dolly Parton, who passed away on Aug. 25, 2026, Ford revisits a 1987 Ford Times feature story in which Dolly Parton talked about the inspiration behind the Dollywood theme park.
In July 1987, Ford Times sent readers to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, for a story headlined “Bring It on Home, Dolly!” The subject was barely a year old: Dollywood, the theme park Dolly Parton had just opened a few miles from Sevierville, the town where she grew up.
Writer Patricia A. Hope described a 400-acre park built on the site of the old Silver Dollar City, reborn under Dolly’s name in May 1986. It already employed 1,150 people and put on 10 shows a day, everything from gospel to bluegrass to cloggers keeping time in calico. Revenue to local merchants was closing in on $23 million, and the park had $12 million budgeted for expansion before its second season was even over.
The numbers weren’t why Dolly built the park. Dolly told Ford Times herself: “I’ve had this dream, a dream to be able to bring something back home, something good for the county in terms of jobs.”
Dollywood wasn’t built to be a Hollywood version of Appalachia. Dolly was explicit about that.
“I wanted to preserve the Smoky Mountain heritage.”Dolly Parton
“I wanted to preserve the Smoky Mountain heritage so people could come here and see what we’re really all about,” she said, “rather than having some Hollywood bunch of people portray Tennessee and the mountain people the way they often do.”
So the park leaned into the real thing: a replica of the house she grew up in, named for her song “In My Tennessee Mountain Home,” blacksmiths, a potter, and a glassblower demonstrating their trades, all set against the Smokies she never stopped singing about.
Dolly kept an apartment in the park so she could drop by between tour stops, sit in on rehearsals and let her own family perform there. Music manager Kathy Brown told Ford Times that Dolly went out of her way not to steal the spotlight from her cast, once standing directly under a bag of confetti rigged to drop at a show’s opening because she didn’t want to miss being part of the moment with everyone else.
Ted Miller, the park’s vice president of development at the time, put it simply: if one word summed up Dolly, it was honesty. “On stage, off stage, she’s always honest and open and outgoing with her people.”
Nearly 40 years later, Dollywood draws millions of visitors a year, and the story hasn’t really changed: a place built less as a business than as a thank-you to the county that raised her.
Read the story via the Ford Times archive, July 1987. Browse more at FordHeritageVault.com.
