Featured Image Courtesy: Wate.com
Officials working on containment of a major wildfire near Dollywood are hoping that a wet few days ahead may help further contain the blaze that has claimed about 3,000 acres so far. The first has been burning in the Wears Valley area close to Pigeon Forge, the home of Dollywood. Some potential tourists may have stayed away from the Smoky Mountains theme park for fear of the fire, but there’s never been any danger to the park and the fires have been many miles away. No air quality problems have been noticed around the park either.
Still, for those who work at Dollywood or in the surrounding tourist industry of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, the fires have been a sad thing to see.
Jo Ann Vaughn remembers feeling amazed at how beautiful the Von Bryan Estate was when she first saw it in 1988. On Monday, she felt sad.
“It’s hard to think of how it was… it was such a big presence,” she said. “Now, it’s nothing much. Just rubble and ashes, lots of ashes.”
Her son, Patrick Vaughn, and their family spent the day sifting through the rubble. They found coffee cups, planters and most notably, a light blue milk pitcher covered in soot.
— 10 News
For those who have never been in the area, Wears Valley is a paradisaical sort of mixture of private and public lands near Dollywood in which wildlife and farm life come together. If you can imagine rolling green meadows, rustic cabins, wooded mountains, and a timeless quality of craftsmanship, that’s the sort of place that Wears Valley is. Tourists visiting Dollywood or snowboarding at Ober Gatlinburg will often go to Wears Valley to watch craftspeople create items in the way it was done a hundred years ago.
That Park Place extends our sympathies to all those who have faced property damage and loss due to the fires.
