Between 1986 and 2021, Dolly Parton’s uncle Bill Owens planted roughly 70,000 trees by hand across the hills and walkways of Dollywood.
Long before the Pigeon Forge property carried his niece’s name, Owens had returned from Nashville to his native Sevier County in the late 1970s to work and perform at the park when it still operated as Silver Dollar City. When Dolly became a co-owner and rebranded the attraction as Dollywood in 1986, the man who had given her a first real Martin guitar at age eight and co-wrote her early Music Row hits chose a working life outdoors and on small park stages over a corporate office.
For more than three decades, Owens strapped on his red Gibson electric guitar to perform daily sets in the Back Porch Theater and the Dreamland Forest area as part of Dolly’s Kinfolks Show. Sharing the bill with his brother Louis Owens, his sister Dorothy Jo, and other East Tennessee relatives, he played fingerstyle country numbers and told park guests stories about driving teenage Dolly to Knoxville radio stations and Nashville publishing houses.
Once the afternoon stages cleared, the BMI Award-winning songwriter traded his guitar strap for work boots and a shovel. Working alongside his wife, Sandy, Owens took personal charge of reforesting the park’s mountain acreage and keeping shade over its paved walkways.
At home, he saved empty paper milk cartons, filled them with mountain soil, and started thousands of oak, maple, dogwood, and pine seedlings from seed before hauling them into the park to transplant by hand. Families walking between rides regularly passed an older man in work clothes pruning branches or digging in the dirt, unaware that he had co-founded Owe-Par Publishing and helped launch the career of the woman whose name stood on the front gate.
That quiet stewardship soon grew into a broader scientific campaign to save one of Appalachia’s lost giants. In the early twentieth century, an imported fungal blight had wiped out roughly four billion American chestnut trees across the eastern United States, stripping the Great Smoky Mountains of a foundational food and timber source that Owens had heard his elders talk about as a boy.
Determined to see the species return to East Tennessee, Owens partnered with The American Chestnut Foundation and researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He encouraged Dolly to back the effort financially and helped establish the Bill Owens American Chestnut Fund through the American Eagle Foundation at Dollywood.
Across twenty years of fieldwork, Owens helped breed blight-resistant hybrid trees, established research orchards, and planted thousands of experimental chestnut saplings across regional mountainsides. In July 2022, The American Chestnut Foundation honored that decades-long commitment by presenting Dolly with the Chestnut Conservation Champion Award on her late uncle’s behalf.
When Owens died in Pigeon Forge on April 7, 2021, at age eighty-five, Dolly released a lengthy written eulogy crediting him as the reason her career existed at all. She wrote that she would never have made it without him standing beside her in her childhood years, driving her along country roads to local radio shows, and walking her down the streets of Nashville until record labels finally listened.
In that April 2021 tribute, she also noted that it broke her heart to lose the uncle who had written timeless songs, shared her earliest dreams, and spent his later years planting 70,000 trees. Even after he stepped away from Music Row, the man who helped build Dolly Parton’s career spent the rest of his life making sure the mountains that raised them stayed green for the millions of visitors walking beneath his trees.