The Year Helen Went Bavarian

Helen's reinvention is a famous story, and like a lot of famous stories it has been told so many times that the details drifted. Here's what the two most reliable accounts say, side by side. Neither names anyone beyond the artist and, in the encyclopedia's case, Hodkinson, so we don't either.

From the New Georgia Encyclopedia and the City of Helen's history page (courtesy of Chris Brooks and David Grear, authors of Images of America: Helen).

Helen existed because of timber. The Byrd-Matthews company opened a major sawmill around 1910, a railroad linked the new town to Gainesville, and the town was incorporated in 1913, as our Helen history page explains. When the Depression arrived the timber was mostly gone, and the company and most residents left.

By the 1950s and 1960s, the encyclopedia says, the town was a bleak row of concrete-block buildings supporting just nine businesses. Plenty of traffic still passed through on the way to the mountains and waterfalls, and the merchants who remained wondered how to get it to stop.

John Kollock was a regional artist in Clarkesville. The encyclopedia says his 1950s military service in southern Germany inspired his suggestion, and the City of Helen says he recalled his visits to Bavarian towns in similar mountain valleys. He took photographs of the town and drew sketches of what it could become, which the city says were well received by the citizens and merchants. The plan was to spruce up storefronts rather than rebuild: new fronts, trim and paint on what was already standing.

According to the encyclopedia, merchants led by Pete Hodkinson rallied behind the idea. By 1972 Kollock's paintings had taken tangible form, and a trickle of curious visitors soon became a flood. The stranger side of the story, from ten-cent socks to the city's approved font list, is in how a dying lumber town went Bavarian.

Hodkinson's name is attached to the events that kept the new town busy after the facades went up. The encyclopedia calls him as much a visionary as an entrepreneur, and says he brought a spirit of fun as well as place to the project. The Helen to the Atlantic Balloon Race is still flown each June; its 53rd running was June 4 to 6, 2026. The Helen Chamber of Commerce bills its Oktoberfest as the longest-running in the United States.

The encyclopedia also records the objection: many people question Helen's commercialism and its failure to give more attention to its own Appalachian history rather than that of the German Alps, even as they acknowledge its economic success. It's a fair point. The valley's Cherokee and gold-rush history is older and deeper than any chalet facade, and we try to cover it in our Cherokee heritage and gold rush pages.