The secret to carving Dolly Parton into a cornfield, Dianne Fetzer says, is knowing a little algebra.
Once her likeness is replicated, the trick is keeping track of the people who wander into her hair.
“We check every Thursday to make sure nobody’s left behind,” Fetzer says.
She’s joking, of course, although people do occasionally need help finding their way out of her corn maze.
For more than two decades, Dianne and her husband, Joe, have transformed part of their 100-acre Ocoee Valley Farms in Benton into an elaborate corn maze each fall. Called The River Maze, the attraction takes on a new design every year.
This fall, visitors who disappear between the towering rows are walking through a tribute to one of Tennessee’s most recognizable natives: Dolly Parton.
Seen from above, the maze features Parton, a guitar and a butterfly, surrounded by mountains and the words “Peace Like a River,” a nod to Parton’s song and the Ocoee River flowing beside the farm. At ground level, the larger picture disappears. Visitors see walls of corn, intersections and choices about which way to turn.
Getting a little lost is part of the idea.
The Fetzers have long incorporated Tennessee themes into their mazes, including one featuring legendary University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt. That choice had a personal connection for Dianne, who played basketball for Summitt and says she was her first point guard. The couple once hoped to feature Peyton Manning but couldn’t get permission.
Parton had been on their wish list for years.
“We always wanted her in,” Dianne says.
The opportunity finally came through the company that helps the Fetzers design their mazes. Parton’s team approved several possible designs, and the Fetzers chose one featuring Parton, her guitar and a butterfly. They asked to add the mountains and river imagery that have become signatures of their mazes.
The decision was made in May, Dianne says, before Parton’s death. Parton had even recorded promotional material for participating farms, including a customized video encouraging visitors to come out, have fun and get lost.
A little algebra
Turning the approved artwork into acres of navigable corn is where Dianne’s first career comes in handy.
She spent 30 years teaching high school math in Athens and another 10 in Chatsworth, Georgia, while also coaching basketball. When the Fetzers began exploring corn mazes, someone explained that the crop could be planted in a grid. Dianne immediately recognized a coordinate graph.
In the early years, the corn was planted in two directions, creating something like giant graph paper. The Fetzers flagged rows and plotted coordinates across the field. Joe built a 5-foot-wide device from PVC pipe that Dianne pulled along the plotted lines while someone followed with a weed-eater to cut the paths.
Before explaining any of that, however, Dianne offers a simpler answer when asked how they managed to cut elaborate pictures into a field.
“We trained the cows to eat it,” she says.
She lets that sit for a moment, expressionless, until a grin spreads across her face.
“No. I’m kidding.”
The process has become more sophisticated since then, but much of the work remains decidedly hands-on. After watching a professional crew paint a maze pattern onto the ground and cut along it, Dianne decided she could do the same.
Today, a maze company develops the blueprint, while the Fetzers handle much of the work of transferring it to the field.
Even planting requires precision. Dianne stands at one end of the field holding a large slow-moving vehicle triangle while Joe drives the planter toward her, using the sign as a target to keep his line straight. They measure a 90-degree angle to establish the perpendicular lines of the grid.
This year’s corn went into the ground June 30 and July 1, late enough to help it remain green into the fall. Once the design is laid out, Dianne can generally cut a maze in about three days, Joe says. The more complicated Pat Summitt maze took considerably longer.
It’s an unusual second act for a high school math teacher, although Dianne’s route from teacher and coach to corn maze cutter is only one of the unlikely turns in the farm’s history.
Deep roots
Her route to the farm began when she married Joe in 1996 – at 42.
“I was an old basketball coach,” she says. “Men was scared of coaches, I think.”
Joe, 75, has spent most of his life on the land where the couple now welcomes thousands of visitors each fall. His great-great-grandfather bought the property in 1861, although the family lost it during the Depression. Joe’s father began renting the farm again in 1951 and bought it back around 1956, when Joe was about 5 years old.
Joe was already being introduced to farm work. He remembers driving a tractor and helping square bale hay at about 5.
“I’ve been around here a few days farming,” he says.
He grew up in the dairy business and later studied pre-veterinary medicine before circumstances brought him back to farming. Over the years, he worked long hours at a co-op while farming on his own, traveled for about two and a half years selling animal vaccines and eventually operated a dairy for roughly 14 and a half years.
The dairy is gone now, but Joe can still stand near the area where families gather and remember coming outside at 2 a.m. to find about 100 cows there.
Sometimes the cows chose less-convenient destinations.
Dianne prompts him to tell about the time some got loose and headed toward a nearby nightclub. When Joe objects to the suggestion that the cattle had actually intended to go there, Dianne doubles down on her version.
“They was going to the dance hall,” she insists.
Long before dairy cows wandered the property, mule teams passed through carrying copper from the Copper Basin toward Cleveland. Joe’s great-great-grandfather was among the copper haulers, and the Old Copper Road crossed the Ocoee River on what is now the Fetzers’ farm.
Dianne tells a piece of local folklore about wagons becoming mired in the muddy meadow near the crossing. According to the story, a man known as Fiddling George Barnes would pull out his fiddle and play while the mule teams rested before trying again.
The old crossing is still there, another layer of history on land that has repeatedly changed with the people trying to make a living from it.
A new way to farm
For Dianne and Joe, the next major change began with a simple economic reality.
“Farming, it didn’t pay that much,” Dianne says.
Joe had read about a corn maze at an Indiana apple orchard in the early 1990s, and after the couple married, they traveled there to see it. They initially decided the attraction required more labor than they wanted to take on, but the idea resurfaced during a Farm Bureau convention in Nashville, where a map of Tennessee’s river system, with waterways branching across the state, looked to them like paths through a maze.
They opened their first one around 2005, using Tennessee’s rivers as the design.
Their second maze covered about 20 acres, which proved far larger than necessary, and over the years, they refined both the size of the attraction and the way they created it. The maze eventually became the centerpiece of a broader fall operation that has drawn as many as 12,500 visitors in a season.
Today, families come not only to get lost in the corn but to pick pumpkins, walk among flowers and sunflowers, take hayrides, see animals, gather around bonfires and try an expanding assortment of games and activities.
School groups fill weekdays, while the farm opens to the public on weekends.
The attraction has grown, but it remains unmistakably a farm. Joe still grows the pumpkins, Dianne plants flowers, and the couple works on the maze themselves.
Meanwhile, Joe continues dreaming up new things to build. This year’s addition is a 150-foot slide that sweeps down a hillside toward the corn maze below.
That balance between embracing the past and building something new also makes Parton a fitting subject for this year’s maze.
Dianne remembers watching “The Porter Wagoner Show” with her grandmother when she was young, listening as she sang along when Parton appeared on television. But what matters most to Dianne now is the way Parton carried her beginnings with her.
She could have left her poor, rural Tennessee upbringing behind after she became successful, Dianne says. Instead, she embraced where she came from and made it part of her identity.
The Fetzers have done something similar with their farm.
The corn maze and fall attractions have helped them adapt to an agricultural economy that has changed dramatically during Joe’s lifetime, but the transformation has not required erasing what came before.
The old copper route remains part of the property, where visitors can walk toward the river crossing once used by mule wagons. Pumpkins still come out of the fields, and Joe continues working ground his family first acquired more than 160 years ago, making the farm’s history part of the experience rather than simply a story about its past.
For Dianne, who grew up on a farm herself, there’s value in giving people a chance to spend time in that world.
“It’s a good life,” she says. “Maybe not that profitable, but it’s a good life.”
This fall, that life includes several acres of Dolly Parton.
Visitors step into the corn somewhere within a picture too large for them to see, choosing one turn after another through Parton’s portrait, a butterfly, mountains and the words “Peace Like a River.”
Most eventually find their way out.
And if they don’t, Dianne says she checks on Thursdays.