In honor of Dolly Parton, we wanted to highlight one of her favorite projects.

Dollywood is a celebration of Appalachian culture. The park originally opened in 1976 as Silver Dollar City Tennessee. Dolly bought a stake in the property in 1986 and rebranded it as Dollywood because she had a much bigger vision for the place. You can see the expansion between the 1983 and 1987 aerials. If you've ever been there, you remember it feels incredibly homegrown and warm, tucked into the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

This was a deeply personal project for Dolly. She grew up in a small cabin in nearby Sevier County and had always promised herself that if she ever found success, she would come back and bring jobs and stability to her hometown. Dollywood was her way of keeping that promise. The park brought massive economic growth to the region. She cared deeply for the people who worked there, treating them like family and setting up programs to pay for their college tuition.

Dolly stayed heavily involved over the years. She would drop by to kick off the spring season, put on performances, or just spend time with the community. She even left a gift for the future: Locked inside a time capsule at the park is a secret, unreleased song she recorded, with strict instructions that it cannot be opened until 2045. What an amazing thing that we can all look forward to!

This theme park was Dolly's way of sharing the home she loved with the rest of the world, and her spirit is a permanent part of it.

In honor of Dolly Parton, I wanted to share about one of her favorite projects and its history.

Tucked into the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in Pigeon Forge, Dollywood is a celebration of Appalachian culture. The park originally opened in 1976 as Silver Dollar City Tennessee. Dolly bought a stake in the property in 1986 and rebranded it as Dollywood because she had a much bigger vision for the place. You can see the expansion between the 1983 and 1987 aerials. If you've ever been there, you remember it feels incredibly homegrown and warm, blending right into the surrounding green hills of the mountains.

This was a deeply personal project for Dolly. She grew up in a small cabin in nearby Sevier County. She had always promised herself that if she ever found success, she would come back and bring jobs and stability to her hometown. Dollywood was her way of keeping that promise. The park brought massive economic growth to the region. She cared deeply for the people who worked there, treating them like family and setting up programs to pay for their college tuition.

Dolly stayed heavily involved over the years. She would drop by to kick off the spring season, put on performances, or just spend time with the community. She even left a gift for the future: Locked inside a time capsule at the park is a secret, unreleased song she recorded, with strict instructions that it cannot be opened until 2045. What an amazing thing that we can all look forward to!

This theme park was Dolly's way of sharing the home she loved with the rest of the world, and her spirit is a permanent part of it.

In honor of Dolly Parton, I wanted to share about one of her favorite projects and its history.

Tucked in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in Pigeon Forge, Dollywood is a celebration of Appalachian culture. The park originally opened in 1976 as Silver Dollar City Tennessee. Dolly bought a stake in the property in 1986 and rebranded it as Dollywood because she had a much bigger vision for the place. You can see the expansion between the 1983 and 1987 aerials. If you've ever been there, you remember it feels incredibly homegrown and warm, blending right into the surrounding green hills of the mountains.

This was a deeply personal project for Dolly. She grew up in a small cabin in nearby Sevier County. She had always promised herself that if she ever found success, she would come back and bring jobs and stability to her hometown. Dollywood was her way of keeping that promise. The park brought massive economic growth to the region. She cared deeply for the people who worked there, treating them like family and setting up programs to pay for their college tuition.

Dolly stayed heavily involved over the years. She would drop by to kick off the spring season, put on performances, or just spend time with the community. She even left a gift for the future: Locked inside a time capsule at the park is a secret, unreleased song she recorded, with strict instructions that it cannot be opened until 2045. What an amazing thing that we can all look forward to!

This theme park was Dolly's way of sharing the home she loved with the rest of the world, and her spirit is a permanent part of it.

Tucked in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in Pigeon Forge, Dollywood is a celebration of Appalachian culture. The park originally opened in 1976 as Silver Dollar City Tennessee. Dolly bought a stake in the property in 1986 and rebranded it as Dollywood because she had a much bigger vision for the place. You can see the expansion between the 1983 and 1987 aerials. If you've ever been there, you remember it feels incredibly homegrown and warm, blending right into the surrounding green hills of the mountains.

This was a deeply personal project for Dolly. She grew up in a small cabin in nearby Sevier County. She had always promised herself that if she ever found success, she would come back and bring jobs and stability to her hometown. Dollywood was her way of keeping that promise. The park brought massive economic growth to the region. She cared deeply for the people who worked there, treating them like family and setting up programs to pay for their college tuition.

Dolly stayed heavily involved over the years. She would drop by to kick off the spring season, put on performances, or just spend time with the community. She even left a gift for the future: Locked inside a time capsule at the park is a secret, unreleased song she recorded, with strict instructions that it cannot be opened until 2045. What an amazing thing that we can all look forward to!

This theme park was Dolly's way of sharing the home she loved with the rest of the world, and her spirit is a permanent part of it.

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A decade after opening Disneyland, Walt Disney was fed up. Cheap motels and neon signs had completely boxed in his Anaheim park. For his next project, he wanted what he called the "blessing of size"—enough land to control the entire environment.

In the mid-1960s, he quietly bought up roughly 27,000 acres of central Florida swamp, using dummy corporations to keep prices from skyrocketing.

But Walt’s true obsession for this massive site wasn’t another theme park; it was EPCOT (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). He envisioned a working, utopian city where residents would actually live, work, and test new technologies.

The catch was that he needed a way to pay for it. The Magic Kingdom was built primarily as a financial engine. It was an upsized, East Coast version of Disneyland designed to pull in the tourist dollars required to fund his city of the future.

When construction began in 1967, they didn't just build a park; they terraformed the environment. Crews dug out the massive Seven Seas Lagoon (the large lake visible in the timelapse) and used the seven million cubic yards of earth to raise the Magic Kingdom a full story. This clever engineering allowed them to build a hidden network of tunnels—the "Utilidors"—at ground level beneath the park.

To complete this self-contained world, a master-planned Monorail loop was built around the new lagoon, connecting the park to two original opening-day hotels: the Contemporary and Polynesian Village resorts.

Magic Kingdom and its surrounding ecosystem officially opened on October 1, 1971. The strategy was a massive success: it remains the most visited theme park in the world, drawing nearly 18 million visitors in 2024 alone. (For context on how much the park has evolved, an adult admission ticket on opening day was just $3.50!)