Sautee Nacoochee

Drive about ten minutes southeast of Helen on GA-17 and the Bavarian storefronts give way to something older and quieter. The Sautee and Nacoochee valleys sit at the foot of Mount Yonah in White County, and a crossroads with an old general store anchors them. Within a few miles you can see a mound that stood for centuries before Columbus, a folk pottery museum, a restored cabin that housed enslaved people, a covered bridge and a store that has been open since 1872.

Plan a half day between tubing and schnitzel. Most stops cost little: the History Museum is free and the mound is visible from the road. Hardman Farm and a pottery class are the main places you'll spend money.

Dates come from the Sautee Nacoochee Center, Georgia State Parks and the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

The grassy mound with the white gazebo sits where GA-17 meets GA-75, about two miles south of Helen. It's the most photographed spot in the county. The platform mound dates to the Lamar phase of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture, roughly 1350 to 1600. A 1915 excavation, one of Georgia's first scientific digs, found 75 burials, some with hammered copper, shell beads and fine pottery, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

Locals tell a story about star-crossed lovers named Sautee and Nacoochee who were buried together in the mound. It's a legend, and it isn't supported by the archaeology. The real history is just as moving: a village that stood here for generations, Cherokee towns after it, and a mound that the owner of the land trimmed by two feet in 1890 to put a gazebo on top.

Today the mound is part of the story at Hardman Farm State Historic Site, 143 Highway 17. Georgia State Parks lists grounds admission at $7, and mansion tours run Thursday through Saturday. Dr. Lamartine Hardman, later governor, was the last private owner, and his family gave the farm to the state in 1999. Go near sunset, when the light comes low across the pasture.

GA-17 through the valley follows the Unicoi Turnpike, a roughly 150-mile route that tied the Cherokee towns of Tennessee to the Georgia and Carolina coast. In 1813 the Cherokee agreed to a toll road; they were promised $160 a year and, by most accounts, never got it.

The road's history turned dark in 1838, when it became the first leg of the Trail of Tears for more than 3,000 Cherokee. Traveler's Rest, a stagecoach inn on the same turnpike near Toccoa, is a surviving stop you can visit; see our Traveler's Rest guide. For the fuller story, read the Nacoochee Valley history.

The Nacoochee Institute was a boarding school founded in 1903 and based in Sautee. In 1926, a fire destroyed it six weeks after another fire destroyed the Rabun Gap Industrial School. The two merged in 1927 and reopened in September 1928, the school that later gave the world the Foxfire project, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

The 1928 Nacoochee School building later sat empty. The Sautee Nacoochee Community Association, formed in the late 1970s to protect the valley, bought it in 1986 and spent ten years renovating it. Today the Sautee Nacoochee Center runs an 8.5-acre campus at 283 GA-255 North with a 98-seat theater, gallery shops, the History Museum, the Folk Pottery Museum and the African American Heritage Cabin, and a Native Peace Garden dedicated in 2019. Call 706-878-3300.

The Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia is one of just a handful of museums in the world that focus only on folk pottery. It opened in 2006 and covers about 200 years of local potters. The museum is open Monday to Saturday 10 AM to 5 PM and Sunday 1 to 5 PM.

Potters brought an alkaline-glaze stoneware tradition to the Georgia foothills in the early 1800s. The glazes, developed around 1815 in South Carolina's Edgefield district, used wood ash or lime mixed with clay and sand and fired to green or brown. Then the market shrank. In 1907 state prohibition ended the whiskey-jug trade, glass and metal containers took over, and the Great Depression finished off many shops, as the encyclopedia's folk pottery entry explains. John Burrison's 1983 book Brothers in Clay is the standard history.

The most famous name in Georgia folk pottery is Meaders. Cheever Meaders inherited the family pottery at Mossy Creek in 1920 and kept making alkaline-glazed stoneware by traditional methods. His son Lanier (1917 to 1998) revived the face jug, using ideas from his mother Arie's work and his father's methods. The National Endowment for the Arts recognized Lanier with a National Heritage Fellowship in 1983.

Face jugs have a deeper history. Scholars trace the American tradition to enslaved African American potters in the Edgefield district of South Carolina in the mid-1800s. Some researchers see links to Central African spiritual traditions, though that is interpretation, not settled fact, according to Wikipedia. For more on the region's craft traditions, see our guide to Helen-area pottery and crafts and the Mark of the Potter.

The museum runs the John Burrison Pottery Studio next door, with nine pottery wheels, a hand-building and sculpture area and two kilns. You can sign up for classes, and an open-studio membership is available for working potters. Check the class calendar or call 706-878-3300 for what's running, and wear clothes you don't mind getting dirty.

A short walk from the main buildings stands a hand-hewn cabin built around 1850. It once housed people enslaved by E.P. Williams, a prosperous local farmer. Jim Johnston and his family donated it in 2002 so it could be preserved, and the restored cabin stands as a reminder of the African Americans who were enslaved here and of their contributions.

It's open for viewing Monday to Saturday 10 AM to 5 PM and Sunday 1 to 5 PM, and guided tours are available by advance request, per the Center's museum page. It's an important and unflinching stop, and worth the walk.

At the crossroads of GA-17 and GA-255, the Old Sautee Store calls itself Georgia's longest operating store. Its own website says it has been serving customers for over 150 years, and the store dates to 1872. Inside you'll find old store fixtures, an imported Swedish farmer cheese the store has sold for more than fifty years, and a Market with sandwiches and baked goods.

Hours from the store's website. It makes an easy lunch stop before Nora Mill, which is about a mile south of downtown Helen.

Stovall Mill Covered Bridge crosses Chickamauga Creek off GA-255, about 7 miles and 15 minutes from downtown Helen. Built in 1895, it's Georgia's smallest covered bridge and is owned by the White County Historical Society. It was a location in the 1951 film I'd Climb the Highest Mountain. Visiting is free. Our covered bridges guide covers the rest of the state.

The Center's calendar gives you reasons to time a trip around the valley. Dates below come from the Center and our events calendar; where a date isn't announced, we say so.

See the full Helen events calendar.

From downtown Helen, take GA-75 south about two miles, then GA-17 into the valley. The Sautee Nacoochee Center is a few minutes farther on GA-255, and you pass the mound at the highway junction. The loop of mound, Center, store and bridge is only a few miles of easy two-lane driving.

For coffee, Sweetwater Coffeehouse is on the valley's main road, and the Old Sautee Store Market handles lunch. Yonah Mountain Vineyards is a short drive away. Fall is the valley at its busiest, with leaf color over Yonah and Helen's Oktoberfest crowds, but spring and winter afternoons are quiet and good for the museums.