Dolly Parton’s name is on the gate, on the maps, and on about six million holiday lights every winter. What most visitors never realize is that she did not build the place from scratch, and she does not own all of it. The theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee had been running for a quarter century before her name ever touched a single sign.
The park is older than its name
Long before it was Dollywood, it was Rebel Railroad. The park opened in July 1961 as a small tourist stop run by the Robbins brothers from Blowing Rock, North Carolina. It had a steam locomotive, a general store, a blacksmith shop, and a saloon. The theme leaned into the centennial of the Civil War, and the signature train ride staged fake “attacks” by Union soldiers, train robbers, and Native Americans, with Confederate riders fighting them off. It was modeled on the family’s other park, Tweetsie Railroad. In 1964 the whole thing was renamed Goldrush Junction and switched to a wild west theme.
A Cleveland Browns owner once ran it
In 1970 the park changed hands in a way almost nobody would guess today. It was bought by Art Modell, the man who also owned the Cleveland Browns football team. Under Modell it kept the railroad and gained an outdoor theater and the Robert F. Thomas Chapel. By 1975 it was simply called Goldrush. Then in 1976, Jack and Pete Herschend, who owned Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, bought it. They renamed it Silver Dollar City Tennessee in 1977 and spent more than $1 million fixing it up.
Dolly only owns half of it
Parton is a 50 percent partner, not the sole owner. Herschend holds the other half, and has since she bought in. She first floated the idea in 1983, describing a fantasy mountain park she expected to open within three to five years. Days later she gave it the name Dollywood. She entered the partnership in 1985, bought her interest in 1986, and the park reopened under her name that May. In 2010 she explained why she got involved, saying she “always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area.”
Opening day jammed a Tennessee highway
The name change worked right away. Attendance jumped about 75 percent, to 1.3 million guests, in the first season as Dollywood, by the park’s own count, and in the days after it opened in 1986, traffic reportedly backed up for six miles on the U.S. highway leading to the gate. Among the 1986 additions were Dolly’s Tennessee Mountain Home, a replica of the cabin where she grew up, and a museum called “Rags to Riches: The Dolly Parton Story.” The old carnival ride nicknamed “The Butter Churn” was pulled out at the end of that season.
The chapel honors the doctor who delivered her
The Robert F. Thomas Chapel is named for the Sevier County doctor who delivered Dolly Parton on January 19, 1946. She was the fourth of twelve children born to Lee and Avie Lee Parton. The chapel is a one-room church with wooden floors and pews, and it still holds services on Sundays. Not far off, a coal-fired steam train called Klondike Katie hauls visitors through the foothills of the Smokies. The 110-ton engine was built in 1943.
There is even a hotel for your dog
Dollywood runs a boarding operation for dogs called Doggywood. You can rent one of twelve kennel runs at $25 a day, or one of four roomier cottages at $35, while you go ride coasters, and the park says reservations are highly recommended. There are also restrooms with nursing stations and a dedicated Baby Care Center for diapering and feeding infants, plus a purchase counter where you can drop your shopping bags and grab them on the way out.
The money dwarfs the roller coasters
Dollywood is the biggest ticketed tourist attraction in Tennessee, and its financial reach runs far past the front gate. A 2021 Tennessee aviation planning study put its yearly economic impact at $1.8 billion and credited it with more than 23,000 jobs in the region. It is Sevier County’s largest employer, with about 4,500 direct workers by Forbes’s count, ahead of manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and schools. The park and its affiliated businesses draw more than 4 million visitors a year, and Sevier County visitors spent $3.9 billion in 2024, a 2 percent bump over the year before. “When I first had the big idea to start Dollywood, my accountants and lawyers all thought I was making a big mistake,” Parton told Forbes in 2025.
She handed out $500 and 332 million books
The Dollywood Foundation, which Parton created in 1988, may be the most surprising piece of the operation. In the early 1990s she promised every 7th and 8th grader in her county $500 if they graduated from high school. That effort, the Buddy Program, dropped the dropout rate for those classes from 35 percent to 6 percent. In 1995 the foundation started Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, mailing free books to young kids. It has since distributed more than 332 million books. After fires destroyed the homes of over 1,000 families in Sevier County in 2016, her My People Fund raised over $12 million and paid $1,000 a month for six months to families who lost their primary residence.
A $50 million ride and a top-ranked park
The newest attraction cost more than $50 million, the largest single-attraction investment in Dollywood’s history. NightFlight Expedition opened on August 19, 2026, inside a 44,000-square-foot building dressed as the hangar of a fictional Smoky Mountain air service. The five-and-a-half-minute ride packs four experiences into one, sending guests on a nighttime flight over the Smokies, a whitewater raft trip through more than 500,000 gallons of water, a roller coaster over a mountain ridge, and a boat ride across a shimmering lake. Tripadvisor readers voted Dollywood the No. 1 theme park in the United States in the 2025 Travelers’ Choice awards and ranked it second behind Knoebels in 2026. Readers of Theme Park Insider placed the park’s Lightning Rod fifth among the world’s roller coasters in January 2026.
Who inherits her half now
Parton died on August 25, 2026, at age 80, and that has raised a question with no public answer yet. Her 50 percent stake in Dollywood is a business interest, and where it lands depends on how her estate was built. She had no children, and her husband of nearly 60 years, Carl Dean, died in 2025. Assets held in trust pass to heirs privately, outside the public probate process, so the public may never learn exactly who controls her share. Dollywood, which called her its “Dreamer-in-Chief,” says it will carry her legacy forward, with Herschend still the operating partner.
