Sevigeonburgville? Remembering Early Pigeon Forge, Sevierville, and Gatlinburg.

I was surfing the blogosphere and came across a fun post by Bay Loftis titled Leaving Pigeon Forge She has some wonderful recollections of early the Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg areas and even coined the term "Sevigeonburgville". Click here to read her full blog post.

She's pretty hard on the "glitz" that has overcome the area that many of us remain nostalgic for. Still, I've snipped out some of my favorite thoughts and stories from her post . . .

"It occurs to me that I have not explained "Sevigeonburgville."

See, it used to be you could go to the Smokies and see three separate towns named Sevierville (hometown of Dolly Parton), Pigeon Forge (home of the Pigeon Forge Pottery), and Gatlinburg (home of... nothing).

A really, really long time ago, someone decided the answer to poverty in the Smokies was to turn it into a tourist destination. Gatlinburg started the mess, building a whole gob of wedding chapels and adding fake Alpine-style gingerbread to the corners of buildings, adding a "ski resort" (snort), and opening several fudge-making emporiums.

When Gatlinburg started getting visitors, Pigeon Forge decided this whole tourism thing sounded like a grand idea, so they picked up where Gatlinburg left off and went for the glitzier, more glamourous and potentially lucrative theme than "Alpine in the Smokies". Yep. Pigeon Forge really wanted to get the go-karts and kiddie rides tourist market. Silver Dollar City was built in the 1970's, I think, adding a "theme park" to the mix. It was all ultra-cheezy. Then the owners of the Silver Dollar City theme parks hired Dolly Parton to be the figurehead of the Pigeon Forge themepark, and a whole new mecca of cheezy attractions was born.

I remember with fondness the way my mother spoke of Pigeon Forge in the 1950's, when she and my father were still newlyweds and would go to the Pigeon Forge Pottery to look at the pottery that they couldn't afford, and then would walk the banks of the Little Pigeon River, searching for arrowheads. Daddy found a lot of arrowheads up there. Knowing what we know today about archeology, he should have left them there, but he didn't. I have them in a little box in my lockbox. They're cool. I bet you couldn't find an arrowhead in the Little Pigeon River now if your life depended on it.

Sevierville has no discernible tourist destinations other than outlet malls.

So after Gatlinburg built all those wedding chapels and Alpine-inspired fudge shoppes, after Pigeon Forge built a replica mill and a whole bunch of go-kart tracks, and after Sevierville built motels and outlet malls galore, they melded together in a seamless megalopolis that they all refuse to acknowledge as a megalopolis.

Ergo, we have merged the names of three towns into what they are now: Sevigeonburgville.

Gatlinburg , Bear's Den , Bears Den , Smoky Mountains , Pigeon Forge , Cades Cove , Attractions