3 minute read
Business titan and longtime Ghost Town owner dead at 98
Seen here in the small church at Ghost Town in 2021, Alaska Presley held out hope that she
would live to see the park rejuvenated again. Cory Vaillancourt photo
Alaska Presley, business titan and longtime Ghost Town owner, dead at 98
Small in stature but towering in her decades-long influence on Haywood County, Alaska Presley passed away on April 7 at Smoky Mountain Health and Rehabilitation, according to an obituary from Wells Funeral Home.
Presley is best known for her almost sixdecade association with famed Maggie Valley mountaintop amusement park Ghost Town in the Sky, although she also held interests in a number of unrelated businesses across Haywood County.
In 1955, Pressley and her late husband, Hubert, came to Maggie Valley.
“Well, it was a little ol’ nothing,” Presley told The Smoky Mountain News in 2019. “It was one straight road, it’s still one straight road. It was not very much inhabited at that time. But the tourists was coming through, and it was still good business in the summertime.”
That led the Presleys and R.B. Coburn to shave the top off Buck Mountain and construct a unique attraction that would draw more than half-million visitors a year for over 50 years.
“It brought the people in,” Presley said of Ghost Town, which opened in 1961. “You couldn’t take care of the people, there was so many of them. I stood there at Ghost Town many a time and made more of them mad than anything else, because I couldn’t get them up on the mountain.”
At the time, Maggie Valley was an unincorporated hamlet, home to less than 200 people. Many of them worked at the park alongside movie and television stars like Burt Reynolds, Cowboy Coward, Robert Bradley and Dan Blocker of Bonanza in the park’s live-action cowboy shootouts.
As tourism began placing incredible strain on Maggie’s non-existent infrastructure — there were no sidewalks and sewage was often straight-piped into Jonathan Creek — the Presleys became instrumental in the fight to incorporate the town, which finally happened in 1974.
Eventually, the Presleys sold the park, which continued to operate through the early 2000s. After years of neglect and bad business dealings, the park began a long, slow descent into obsolescence and finally bankruptcy.
In 2012 at age 88, Alaska Presley purchased the park for $2.5 million at auction with an eye toward reviving it. Although Ghost Town did open periodically and sporadically for the next three years, it never regained its former glory and left a gaping hole in the local economy when it finally closed in 2016.
Over the next decade, a number of attempts were made to resurrect the park in conjunction with a relentless stream of developers looking to cash in on the enduring popularity of Ghost Town, but all efforts came up empty.
It’s not yet clear how, if at all, current efforts to redevelop the park will be affected by Presley’s passing. – Cory Vaillancourt, Politics Editor
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Ingles Nutrition Notes
written by Ingles Dietitian Leah McGrath
WHAT DOES “PASTURE-RAISED” MEAN?
Pasture-raised can mean a variety of different things depending on the animal or poultry and who is putting the label on the final product. According to the USDA, pasture-raised on labels is synonymous with: “Free Roaming, Pasture Fed, Pasture Grown… and Meadow Raised” on labels. An important reminder is that the term “pasture-raised” applies to how the animals and poultry live and NOT what the animals or poultry are fed.
There is no inherent description of what this “pasture” looks like; so if you are envisioning a few animals or poultry in wide open spaces, that may not necessarily be the case. According to the USDA, in order to use this wording on a label the grower/producer/farmer must provide documentation that substantiates “…. that the animals or birds have continuous, free access to the outdoors throughout their usual grow-out period”
Sources: Food Safety and Inspection Service Labeling Guideline on Documentation Needed to Substantiate Animal Raising Claims for Label Submissions (usda.gov)
Leah McGrath, RDN, LDN Ingles Market Corporate Dietitian @InglesDietitian Leah McGrath - Dietitian
