The Forge That Named a Town: Why Pigeon Forge Is Called Pigeon Forge

A sky full of pigeons

Imagine standing on the banks of a Tennessee mountain river in the early 1800s and looking up to find the sky going dark — not with weather, but with birds. Flocks of passenger pigeons a mile wide and hundreds of miles long, so dense that their weight snapped limbs off the trees where they roosted, so numerous that pioneers said the trees were "stripped of limbs by the weight of their great numbers." John James Audubon watched one flock pass over Kentucky in 1813 and estimated a billion birds. Scientists have calculated the passenger pigeon made up a quarter to two-fifths of all the birds in the United States — three to five billion birds, the most abundant bird on Earth.

The river those flocks haunted is the Little Pigeon River, rising below Mount Guyot and near Charlies Bunion inside what is now Great Smoky Mountains National Park, winding some thirty miles through Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge before joining the French Broad. Early settlers named the river for the birds. A century later the birds were gone entirely — the last wild passenger pigeon died in Ohio around 1900, and Martha, the last of her species, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914, at about one in the afternoon. Her body rests at the Smithsonian. The pigeons survive now only in the names they left behind — and in this town's.

The forge

The second half of the name arrived in 1817, with a man named Isaac Love (1783–1854) and a furnace.

Tennessee had a law on the books that gave tax incentives to iron works built on land declared "unfit for cultivation" — the state wanted iron made locally, and it was willing to pay in tax breaks to get it. Love took the offer. He acquired more than 7,000 acres along the river, mined brown hematite ore from the hills northeast of the site, and hauled it down by ox-drawn wagons. On the east bank of the Little Pigeon, near where the Old Mill stands today, he built an iron forge: a bloomery furnace to smelt the ore into pig iron, and a 500-pound trip hammer to beat the pig iron into bar iron, all of it fueled by charcoal and driven by the river's water. Local historians note the Loves eventually operated three forges along the river's east bank.

It never paid. The iron business lost money year after year, and in 1841 Love shut the furnaces down and sold the entire operation to Alexander Preston. But here's the lovely twist of history: the failed business left its name on the successful town. On May 29, 1841, Isaac's son William K. Love established the community's post office — and gave it the name "Pigeon Forge," joining the river's pigeons to his father's forge. A name coined at a post office counter has outlasted the business by nearly two centuries.

The forge itself was dismantled sometime before 1884. But the 500-pound hammer was preserved, displayed at various sites over the years — the one surviving tooth of the enterprise.

The mill that wouldn't die

Eleven years before the post office was named, the Love family had built something that would last. The Old Mill, raised in 1830 on the east bank of the West Fork of the Little Pigeon River, is still a working water-powered gristmill — and the only structure in Pigeon Forge on the National Register of Historic Places. It stands on land that was part of a 151-acre grant made in 1810 to Mordecai Lewis, a Revolutionary War veteran from Virginia.

The mill lived many lives. During the Civil War it "worked for the Union": the Trotter family, which owned and operated it from 1849 to 1900, ran looms on the second floor weaving cloth for United States soldiers, while the third floor served as a makeshift hospital — this in a region where East Tennessee Union sympathizers burned bridges, cut telegraph wires, and spied for the North. In the early 1900s a generator was installed, and the mill supplied electricity to the surrounding area until about 1930. After Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in 1934, Pigeon Forge became a tourist boom town, and the mill became one of its beloved landmarks. It grinds grain to this day.

From mill town to mountain stage

For most of its history, Pigeon Forge was what the Old Mill was: a working place. The earliest settlement — the "Fanshiers" community of the Wear, Fancher, and Lovelady families — arrived in the 1780s, after the Cherokee ceded the lands south of the French Broad River in the 1791 Treaty of Holston. By the early 1900s the landscape was rolling farmland with blacksmith shops, a cannery, and a feed and grain business. The national park brought the first tourism in the 1930s, mostly overflow from Gatlinburg; the 1950s brought roadside attractions like Hillbilly Village. The community wasn't even incorporated until 1961.

And in that same year, 1961, a little attraction called Rebel Railroad opened on the site that would become the most famous theme park in Tennessee. It became Goldrush Junction — at one point owned by Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, its log flume having debuted at the 1964 New York World's Fair — then Silver Dollar City under Jack and Pete Herschend in the mid-1970s, celebrating Appalachian crafts. Finally, on May 3, 1986, it became Dollywood, when East Tennessee's own Dolly Parton — born in nearby Sevier County, delivered as a baby by Dr. Robert F. Thomas, for whom the park's chapel is named — partnered with the Herschends. Parton had said she dreamed of "a Smoky Mountain fairyland — where her people could work."

The town rebuilt itself around the visitors. The Great Smoky Mountains Parkway — 23.04 miles from the national park boundary to I-40 in Kodak, roughly following the Little Pigeon River — was built and expanded through the 1950s and 1960s into one of Tennessee's most congested non-freeway roads, carrying more than 50,000 vehicles a day in places. It is the main street of the whole valley now, serving Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, and Sevierville alike. Dollywood grew into Tennessee's biggest ticketed attraction and Sevier County's largest employer, and the town of barely 6,000 residents came to welcome more than ten million visitors a year — tourism its only industry, driving over $1.5 billion in annual revenue. The forge is long gone; the pigeons are extinct; but the name draws millions.

Come see where the story started

History in Pigeon Forge isn't behind glass — you can walk it. Stand on the banks of the Little Pigeon where Isaac Love's trip hammer pounded. Tour the Old Mill and watch the waterwheel turn the same way it has since 1830. Imagine the sky darkening with a billion wings.

And when you're done walking the story, come home to your own. Zara's Getaways' Pigeon Forge retreats — Lumina Lodge, Kalmia Ridge, and Anga Haven — sit minutes from the Old Mill, the Parkway, and Dollywood, tucked into the same Smoky Mountain foothills the first settlers cleared. The forge named the town. Now the town can be your base for making your own history here.