From her girlhood in the hollers of Tennessee, Dolly Parton had many outsize ambitions. She announced one of the most outlandish in an interview with Barbara Walters in 1982: She wanted to build “a fantasy city” in the Smoky Mountains — a “mountain Disneyland” in what she called “one of the most wonderful places in the world.”

Like most of Parton’s monumental dreams, this one was achieved in just a few years’ time. Dollywood opened in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., in 1986, with a steam train whistling through the towering Great Smokies where Parton grew up. An expansion and rebranding of an existing amusement park, Dollywood at first represented a shrewd business deal: Parton was splitting the stakes with the park’s previous owners, a company called Herschend Family Entertainment, who benefited from her fame and promotional skills.

Dollywood never lost that homey connection to its founder, and as it grew it came to symbolize much of what Parton, who died at 80 on Tuesday after a brief battle with cancer, stood for: uniting people through music, community, a good time — sometimes raucous, often corny, always genuine — and a faithful devotion to the region, the people and the culture that raised her. The park serves as a significant boosting ground for Appalachian roots music, and it employs many members of Parton’s large extended family. Though Pigeon Forge is home to many entertainment businesses, Dollywood is still the largest employer in the county. A 2021 state government report said it directly generated $1.8 billion annually, and it now has nearly twice as many visitors, upward of four million.

In 2022, it announced a full tuition payment program for college at partner institutions, available to any of its thousands of employees — including part-time or seasonal staff — starting on their first day of work. “We want people to have opportunities,” Parton, whose title at the park was dreamer in chief, told me in 2022. One of her last public moments was on Aug. 14, when she appeared in a video introducing Dollywood’s newest roller coaster, Night Flight Expedition, a one-of-a-kind indoor attraction that cost more than $50 million. It’s part of a planned decades-long expansion to the park and its adjacent resorts that Parton and Eugene Naughton, the operation’s president, announced in 2021.