The Lumber Era

Before the Bavarian fronts and the Oktoberfest crowds, Helen was a mill town. The New Georgia Encyclopedia says the Byrd-Matthews Corporation, drawn by the area's vast virgin hardwoods, set up a major sawmill there around 1910, and that a railroad connector soon linked the new town to Gainesville. The town took its name from a lumber-company figure's daughter. Without that sawmill, there would have been no town to remake in 1969.

Sources: the encyclopedia entries on Helen, White County and forest removal in the Georgia mountains, and Wikipedia for the 1913 incorporation.

The sawmill needed a way to ship its lumber, so the Gainesville and Northwestern Railroad came up the valley. The encyclopedia says it was built to carry mill products and was the only railroad that ever served White County. It went out of business in the early 1930s. Our railroad history page covers other lines in the mountains.

Helen itself was laid out by John E. Mitchell of St. Louis in 1912 and 1913, according to Wikipedia, and was incorporated on August 18, 1913. The nickname that dates from the same era is the "Star of the North." Accounts differ slightly on who the town was named for: the encyclopedia says a Byrd-Matthews partner's daughter, while Wikipedia says a lumber official's. Either way, the name came with the company.

Industrial logging reached north Georgia around 1880, when large timber companies, mostly run by northern industrialists, bought tens of thousands of acres for a few dollars an acre, often from poor mountain farmers.

According to the encyclopedia's entry on forest removal in the Georgia mountains, they used heavy machinery and clear-cutting, pushed railroads into rugged hollows and built splash dams: temporary log dams across mountain streams that backed up cut timber and were then exploded to wash the logs downstream in a single flood. The entry says these methods stripped almost every mountain watershed and hurt wildlife and fisheries.

Before that, the same entry notes, the mountains were largely old-growth forest dominated by American chestnut and other large trees. Mountain homesteaders had mostly logged for their own use and in ways that let the forest grow back.

Helen's mill thrived until the Great Depression, when most of the timber was gone, the encyclopedia says. The company and most residents moved on to other forests, and the railroad closed. By the 1950s and 1960s the town was little more than a row of concrete-block buildings with nine businesses. That's the town the merchants of 1968 and 1969 set out to rescue; read that story on our 1969 page.

The Weeks Act of 1911 let the Forest Service buy badly overcut land so it could regrow. The encyclopedia says north Georgia's national forest, the Chattahoochee, was formally designated in 1937 but began as part of a much larger Cherokee National Forest purchase in 1917.

The Forest Service eventually acquired 749,000 acres in north Georgia, most of it from the timber companies. Today the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest surrounds Helen. Most of what you hike through there is second-growth forest; the encyclopedia estimates virgin stands cover less than 2 percent of the Chattahoochee National Forest.

To walk through second-growth woods, try the Lake Trail at Unicoi State Park or take a forest drive through the fall color; our fall color guide covers the best routes.