Parton promises more growth for Dollywood
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“We are just getting started,” she told the opening-day crowd. “We are going to keep dreaming and continuing to grow … and prove that we are one of the best theme parks in the whole wide world.”
Parton said during an interview with The Associated Press that the future may also include a Dollywood resort hotel in Pigeon Forge, additions to Dollywood’s dinner-horse theater Dixie Stampede and water park Splash Country, and maybe even a Dollywood II or Dollywood III.
“But it will have to make good sense,” said Parton, who backed away from a proposed Dollywood II in Japan a few years ago.
Nashville, which lost its Opryland amusement park in the 1990s, could be Dolly’s next target.
“They don’t have a theme park there now and someone will have eventually, and we are looking to that possibility,” Parton said. “Whether or not that ever happens, I don’t know.”
As part of the 20th anniversary celebration Friday, a 1982 interview was played in which Parton told Barbara Walters she had a dream for a theme park back home in the Tennessee hills that would be “sort of a fantasy city … a Smoky Mountain fairy land.”
Perhaps only Parton could foresee how it would turn out.
The 125-acre Dollywood features more than 30 mountain-themed rides and attractions, musical shows from country to gospel, and native craftsmen. It drew more than 2.2 million visitors in 2004, making it the top paid tourist attraction in Tennessee — nearly four times as many visitors as traveled to Elvis Presley’s Graceland in Memphis.
Dollywood also ranked 28th out of more than 400 U.S. parks in attendance last year, according to the trade publication Amusement Business. Its attendance already tops some Six Flags parks though still is dwarfed by No. 1 Magic Kingdom at Disneyworld at 15 million.
“They have a formula there that is working for them, and they have got some terrific products to promote,” said Bill Hardman, president and CEO of the Southeast Tourism Society in Atlanta.
Parton partnered in 1985 with Branson, Mo.-based Herschend Enterprises to convert their modest Silver Dollar City in Pigeon Forge into Dollywood. Attendance doubled in a year, and the local economy boomed as outlet malls, music theaters and restaurants sprang up.
The mountain resort town of 5,456 residents recorded $714 million in gross business receipts last year. In July, alone, Pigeon Forge brought in nearly as much money as in all of 1984, before Dollywood arrived.
“There was a wonderful number of people coming in,” said Susan Whitaker, Tennessee commissioner for tourism development. “But when Dolly put her name to that theme park, that changed everything.”
Jack Herschend credits Parton’s business savvy, starting with a suggestion to build a “museum” of her mementos at the park.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a yawner.’ And it turned out to be tremendously successful,” he said. “I don’t know how she does it. She has a sense of what people want.”
Parton says she didn’t get into Dollywood for personal wealth but to help her native Sevier County in the Appalachians. Dollywood employs more than 2,000 people, including at times most of Parton’s 289 kinfolk.
“I was just feeling Dollywood would do a lot of good for the folks back here because I have watched my family and other families around here struggle to make ends meet,” she said.
“I wanted to create a place where families can have fun and also to give folks good work and have enough money to raise a good family of their own.”
So what will Dollywood look like in 20 years?
“Well, you never know,” the 59-year-old Parton said brightly.
“You try to set up these things in your lifetime that will still go and be just as good or better after you are gone,” she said. “So if you do your job right … it will carry on.”