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. The cabin had no electricity and no running water, and it is the home behind My Tennessee Mountain Home, the album RCA released in April 1973 and the first record for which she wrote every song. It opens with a recitation of a letter she had sent her parents after leaving for Nashville. The record reached number nineteen on the country albums chart and carries a song called In the Good Old Days, When Times Were Bad. She went to elementary school at Caton's Chapel, a few miles west. The doctor who delivered her was a Methodist missionary physician named Robert F. Thomas, who by her own telling was paid with a sack of cornmeal. She wrote a song about him, and a foundation in his name was set up in Sevier County in 1983. Accounts differ on which cabin she was actually born in. The usual telling puts the birth in a one-room cabin on the Little Pigeon River at Pittman Center, a couple of miles south, with the move up to Locust Ridge coming afterwards, while others place it on the ridge itself. No source fixes the spot more closely than that. The Locust Ridge house still stands on private land behind a fence and is not open to visitors, and a replica of it was built at Dollywood by her brother Bobby, with the interior arranged by their mother and furnished with family belongings.
Getting there
35.7973, -83.3807
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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