From Cherokee Valley to Bavarian Village

Sources: the New Georgia Encyclopedia on Helen and on White County, the City of Helen, and Wikipedia's articles on Helen and the Unicoi Turnpike.

Before any town existed here, the Nacoochee and Sautee valleys were Cherokee country, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia notes that the area a century before Helen's founding was the heart of both Cherokee and gold mining country. Helen sits along the former route of the Unicoi Turnpike, which started as a Native American trail linking Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia.

In 1813 the Cherokee agreed to let the U.S. build a toll road along it, and a company led by Russell Wiley turned it into a wagon road by 1817. Under the treaty, the tribe was to be paid $160 a year; Wikipedia says the payments were reportedly never made.

In the 1830s the same road carried more than 3,000 Cherokee people on the first leg of the Trail of Tears. You can still see one of the roadside inns, Traveler's Rest in Toccoa, now a National Historic Landmark; see our Travelers Rest page. For the valley's mounds and the people who built them, start with Cherokee heritage. Georgia State Parks describes the Sautee Nacoochee Indian Mound at Hardman Farm as a burial site probably used long before the Cherokee lived in the area.

The encyclopedia says gold was discovered in 1828 around Duke's Creek, now called the Nacoochee River, which started the gold rush in this part of Georgia. Nine mines operated in White County, and mining continued for more than a century. The best-known stories of the first finds are folklore (see our gold rush page for what the record actually shows). For the story of what the rush meant for the Cherokee, read the same page.

You can still see the scars. Smithgall Woods State Park, about 10 minutes from downtown Helen, calls itself land reclaimed from hydraulic gold mining, and the encyclopedia says it holds remnants of Georgia's earliest gold mines. For gold panning and the museum, go to Dahlonega, about 40 minutes away.

The town came from trees. The Byrd-Matthews company, drawn by the area's virgin hardwoods, opened a big sawmill on the Chattahoochee around 1910, and the Gainesville and Northwestern Railroad was built to carry its products out. The encyclopedia says that railroad is the only one that ever served White County.

John E. Mitchell laid out the town in 1912 and 1913, and Helen was incorporated on August 18, 1913. The nickname "Star of the North" dates from the same era. According to the encyclopedia the name came from a Byrd-Matthews partner's daughter, though accounts differ on exactly who she was.

It didn't last. The mill thrived until the Depression, when most of the timber had been cut and the company and most residents moved on to other forests, and the railroad went out of business in the early 1930s.

By the 1950s and 1960s Helen was, in the encyclopedia's words, little more than a bleak row of concrete-block buildings with nine businesses. Traffic streamed through on its way to the mountains and waterfalls.

In the account the New Georgia Encyclopedia gives, local businessmen met for a lunch in 1968, looking for a way to stop some of that traffic, and consulted John Kollock, a regional artist from Clarkesville. Kollock had served in southern Germany in the 1950s, and he gave them watercolors of a Bavarian village. The merchants, led by Pete Hodkinson, took it from there.

The City of Helen tells it with a slightly different date: three businessmen met at a local restaurant in January 1969, and one of them knew Kollock from church in Clarkesville. Kollock took photos and drew sketches that the citizens and merchants liked, and by the fall of 1969 many old buildings had new facades. The encyclopedia adds that by 1972 Kollock's paintings had become real buildings, and that the trickle of curious visitors turned into a flood.

Hodkinson kept the crowds coming with hot-air balloon races, motorcycle races, Easter olive hunts and a long Oktoberfest, the encyclopedia says. He was killed in a balloon accident in 1976. The Helen to the Atlantic Balloon Race he helped start is still flown in early June; its 53rd running was June 4 to 6, 2026. The detailed story is on our Helen transformation page.

Helen had 531 residents in the 2020 census and calls itself Georgia's Alpine Village. The City says it's the state's third most visited city. Its Oktoberfest, run by the Helen Chamber of Commerce, bills itself as the longest-running in the country; the 2026 festival, the 56th, runs September 10 through November 1.

The encyclopedia also reminds readers that many people question the town's commercialism and its focus on the German Alps rather than its own Appalachian past. This page, and the rest of our history section, is meant to put some of that Appalachian past back in front of you.