Country performer and business owner Dolly Parton died Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 80, according to a statement from her publicist. Her death came almost exactly two months after her June 24 appearance at the grand opening of Dolly's Tennessean Travel Stop in Cornersville, Tennessee, one of her last public appearances.
The travel center sits at Exit 22 off Interstate 65, roughly an hour south of Nashville. It was created through a partnership between Parton, Sachs Capital Group chairman and chief executive Gregory H. Sachs, and Danny Nozell, founder and chief executive of CTK Enterprises and Parton's longtime manager. The venture rebranded and expanded the original Tennessean Travel Stop into a facility aimed at professional drivers, families, and tourists.
The site offers truck parking, fuel, showers, laundry, restaurants, retail space, a coffee shop, a dog park, electric vehicle charging, and event space. When the partners announced the project in March, they described the Cornersville location as a proof of concept for additional sites across Tennessee and potentially elsewhere in the country.
Parton connected the venture to her own decades of highway travel, saying she had spent the bulk of her life on a tour bus and believed the location would fill a gap for drivers on that corridor. The expansion plan now stands as one of the final chapters of a business career that also included Dollywood in East Tennessee and the Imagination Library. No successor plan for the travel stop expansion has been announced.
Source: FreightWaves - https://www.freightwaves.com/news/dolly-parton-dies-at-80-two-months-after-opening-tennessee-truck-stop