Local Stories in Sevier County
Tennessee·9 places
Music History
Dolly Parton Parkway
The stretch of US 411 running east out of Sevierville carries Dolly Parton's name, and she came home in October 1979 for the naming, playing a show at Sevier County High School on the evening of the sixth. She had graduated from that school in 1964, at eighteen.
Entertainment
Klondike Katie
The older of the two steam locomotives that haul passengers around the theme park at Pigeon Forge was built by Baldwin in Philadelphia in February 1943 for the United States Army, and was shipped to Alaska to move supplies for the building of the Alcan Highway.
Military
The Battle Of Boyds Creek
On 16 December 1780 John Sevier's militia met a Cherokee force on Boyds Creek, west of what is now Sevierville, and won the fight with a trick. The Cherokee had struck the settlements that autumn while Sevier's men were away at Kings Mountain, and he came back after them with something under three hundred mounted militia.
History
The Fire Of 1856
In March 1856 a fire took the Sevier County courthouse in Sevierville, the jail beside it, forty-one houses and most of the town's businesses, and with the courthouse went almost every county record written before that year. The Sevier County Archives begin in 1856 for that reason, and anyone tracing a family in the county runs into the same wall.
History
The Forks Of Little Pigeon
Sevierville stands where the West Prong runs into the Little Pigeon River, and the settlement that grew at the junction was called the Forks of the Little Pigeon before it was called anything else. Isaac Thomas put a farm, a trading post and a tavern at the confluence in 1783, and Spencer Clack and James McMahan followed him.
Education
The Imagination Library
The Imagination Library began in 1995 as a Sevier County programme, run by the Dollywood Foundation from an office on Main Street in Sevierville, and for its first years it mailed free books to children in this one county and nowhere else. Any child registered gets a book a month from birth until the age of five, chosen for their age and addressed to them by name.
Music History
The Locust Ridge Cabin
Dolly Parton was born in January 1946 in a cabin on the Little Pigeon River in Sevier County, the fourth of twelve children of Avie Lee and Robert Lee Parton, and the house the family kept through her childhood was a two-room cabin on Locust Ridge. Her father sharecropped and grew tobacco.
Film History
The Pines Theater
The building at the corner of Joy Street and Court Avenue in downtown Sevierville went up in 1928 as the Watson Motor Company, a car dealership built by J. B. Waters Senior. When civilian car and truck production stopped for the war in 1942, Waters closed the dealership and turned the showroom into a picture house.
History
The Unionist County
When Tennessee voted on separation on 8 June 1861, Sevier County went against it by 1,528 votes to 60, better than ninety-six percent, while the state as a whole voted to leave by more than two to one. East Tennessee was full of counties like it, and Sevier County's loyalists organised a Home Guard that August. It drilled openly at first.
Elsewhere in Tennessee
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
