Pigeon Forge History

In the late 1700s, the city known today as Pigeon Forge enjoyed an early influx of settlers thanks to the land grants awarded to veterans of the Revolutionary War. But when Sevierville became the county seat in 1796, the two communities began to follow different paths. Sevierville flourished and grew, while Pigeon Forge remained a sleepy little town, until tourism began to have an impact on its growth in the mid 20th century.

Early notable citizens of Pigeon Forge include Samuel Wear, a Revolutionary War colonel who became the town’s first permanent white settler, building a homestead on 500 acres near the mouth of Walden’s Creek. Another founder, Isaac Love, inherited his wife’s family’s mill, and their son, William, built the present-day Old Mill on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in the 1820s.

Mills and iron forges were popular businesses back in those days, and the name Pigeon Forge was derived from the town’s iron works and the presence of the Little Pigeon River. The river itself was named after the huge flocks of migratory passenger pigeons that had frequently stopped there in the 1700s and early 1800s to feed on the abundance of beech trees. Interestingly, the passenger pigeon is now extinct, the last one having died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

Throughout the remainder of the 1800s, the iron industry gradually failed, and when the Civil War broke out, the city was used as a Union stronghold. During that time, schools were abandoned, roads deteriorated, and the flow of supplies from surrounding areas dried up. In the early 1900s, however, things started turning around, and Pigeon Forge experienced steady growth as new stores, churches and schools began to spring up.

The establishment of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934 had a major and lasting impact on the town as larger numbers of visitors began passing through Pigeon Forge on their way to Gatlinburg. One of the city’s first tourism-related businesses, Pigeon Forge Pottery, began doing a thriving business near the Old Mill in the 1940s, and in the process helped launch an industry. Pigeon Forge didn’t become an incorporated town until 1961. Slowly but surely, Pigeon Forge began morphing from that sleepy little town into a tourism mecca. Two watershed events in that growth were the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, which sent large numbers of overflow visitors into Pigeon Forge in search of accommodations, and the opening of Dollywood in 1986.

Today, the large expanses of cornfields that had once defined the town have been replaced by dozens and dozens of tourism-related businesses such as music theaters, restaurants, hotels, attractions and shopping malls. In recent years, Pigeon Forge has seen daily traffic reach as high as 40,000 visitors, even though its full-time population still remains only around 6,000.