Helen, Georgia: The Bavarian Village That Never Existed
Near Helen, Georgia
The gingerbread trim, the flower boxes spilling over with petunias, the painted facades with their steep alpine rooflines and arched windows: none of it is European. Everything you see in Helen, Georgia was invented in nine months in nineteen sixty-eight and sixty-nine by a town desperate to survive. This is the Nacoochee Valley, which takes its name from a Cherokee word meaning evening star.
For thousands of years the valley was Cherokee heartland, threaded by an ancient trading trail through the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Cherokee were removed by force in eighteen thirty-eight. Ten years before that removal, gold was found on Dukes Creek just downstream, setting off the first major gold rush in United States history, twenty years before the California Forty-Niners.
Helen itself was founded much later. In nineteen twelve and thirteen, a lumber company laid out a town along the Chattahoochee River and named it for an official's daughter. The Byrd-Matthews Lumber Company drove the economy.
When the timber gave out, the mill closed in nineteen thirty-one, and Helen spent the next four decades declining. By the late nineteen sixties, the brick storefronts along the river were half-empty and the town was wondering what it was for. That is when local businessman Pete Hodkinson and artist John Kollock, who had lived in Germany, proposed something audacious: remake the town as a Bavarian alpine village.
Kollock sketched the existing storefronts with Bavarian additions, gingerbread trim, painted woodwork, steep rooflines, flower boxes. Work crews hammered and painted for years, turning Kollock's watercolor sketches into real storefronts one building at a time. By nineteen seventy-two, Alpine Helen had visibly taken shape, and visitors were already arriving.
The gamble paid off. Helen today draws more visitors than any other mountain town in the Southeast. It hosts one of the largest Oktoberfest celebrations outside of Germany, and the cold, clear Chattahoochee running through the middle of town is famous for tubing.
The mountains look down on a Bavarian fairytale that never existed anywhere in Bavaria.
