It is essential to understand the effects that mass-scale tourism has on people and places in order to determine the way forward that best matches the desired outcome: a financial and societal thriving of the entire Eastern Kentucky Region. The question on the table is this: are mass-scale tourism initiatives, such as a well-planned Gatlinburg-typed development in the Red River Gorge region, the way to meet such goals?
Gatlinburg, TN, is now a well-developed tourism industry with more than half a century of tourism under its belt and so provides essential insight into what the Red River Gorge region might become. In her dissertation “Seasonal Lives: Tourism and the Struggle For Place in Gatlinburg, Tennessee,” scholar of anthropology Jessica Amason examines how mass-scale tourism alters a community “sense of place.” Through her work, she argues that the tourism industry not only fails to provide a solution to local poverty in Gatlinburg but also serves to destroy the cultural space and community in which it began. Identity obliteration often happens as a result of the tourist economy, which, by nature, cannot stay fixed as market demands change. The place then becomes a slave to the market. The market is, after all, controlled by consumers, not the suppliers. What is left on the far side of market frenzy, she observes, is not prosperity but something akin to despair “the result is a new type of poverty not usually associated with Appalachia, where abandoned amusement parks sit decaying and lifeless, and once-prosperous motels become halfway houses for Gatlinburg's severely underpaid workforce¹⁷.”
A Brief History of Gatlinburg’s Tourism Boom
Like Kentucky Chamber’s initiative for Eastern Kentucky, the tourist industry of Gatlinburg began as a genuine effort toward prosperity and progress in 1913. In the then quiet small town of Gatlinburg along the Little River, Resident Andy Huff saw the need for education and skills training for the younger generation in order that they might be free from the “back-breaking labor of farmwork.” He took action, banding the community together to purchase land for a craft school.
The school was a success, and by 1925, nine shops sold locally made handicrafts to visitors. In 1934, the Great Smoky Mountains became a national park. The tourism industry in Gatlinburg took off as the town provided amenities not available inside the park's boundaries. Large corporations flocked to the area, enticed by the promise of large profit margins.
Case Study On Gatlinburg, TN
By the 1950s, large-scale tourism spread like wildfire, with amusement parks, famous culture museums, putt-putt golf courses, hillbilly themes restaurants, and souvenir stores. The Little River that Andy Huff’s children once played along the banks of was now surrounded by ever-changing tourist trap development. Development is concerned solely with one task: making a greater margin.
Such an economy, Amason argues, by nature, does not and cannot care about the impoverished citizens or the environment. Both people and places are sold out to the mercy of the tourism industry, and there is often no alternative for individuals other than to leave. Moreover, those that remain, she observes, “they [locals] engage in day-to-day struggles with the ills of mass-scale tourism: low-wage jobs, housing crises, and negative opinions that characterize their hometown as crowded, tacky, and lowbrow.” Instead of addressing poverty and providing a meaningful, living wage for residents as locals once hoped, mass-scale tourism has furthered economic inequity and left the local residents with the mess of the aftermath of millions of vacationers. As of 2020, Gatlinburg experienced more than 12.5 million visitors. Even so, economists continue to emphasize the need for locals to attract more tourists. Their success now depends on their ability to attract consumers to buy their own piece of the “Appalachian” experience. Even so, the busier Gatlinburg becomes, the more business must focus on marketing a cheap tourist experience, which, as Amason insists, not only is inauthentic to the place and the people but even destroys the authenticity that originally was the core value of the place. True “placelessness” gets irrevocably buried under commercial “experience development.”
If the negative socio-cultural impacts on the local community of Gatlinburg are staggering, the ecological aftermath proves little better. Not only do businesses filter waste into the waterways, downtown Gatlinburg experiences flooding because of the mass of development which further impacts the community of low socioeconomic status downstream . When rainfall events occur, but water is also no longer significantly sequestered into the vegetation and underground reservoirs, as the historical hydrology patterns are no longer functioning; creek and river banks cannot hold the new massive influxes of water. Not only have developments overloaded waterways beyond capacity, but they have also caused mass erosion and landslides, damaging roads, waterways, housing, and developments.