The Star of the North: Helen's Lumber Town Origins
Near Helen, Georgia
Helen was born because of trees. The hardwood forests of White County were thick and valuable, and the timber industry needed a base in these mountain gorges to harvest them. John E.
Mitchell of Saint Louis laid out the town in nineteen twelve and nineteen thirteen. When it came time to name the new settlement, a lumber official suggested the name of his daughter Helen, and there was little objection. The town incorporated on August eighteenth, nineteen thirteen, billed locally as the Star of the North.
The engine of the town was the Byrd-Matthews Lumber Company, which harvested the surrounding mountains and sent timber out by rail. For a generation, Helen was a working logging town, rough and functional and economically dependent on a finite resource. The timber gave out, as it always does.
The Byrd-Matthews mill closed in nineteen thirty-one, at the start of the Great Depression, and the town began a long slow contraction. Shops closed. Families left.
The brick commercial blocks along the Chattahoochee sat increasingly empty through the nineteen thirties, forties, and fifties. By the late nineteen sixties, Helen was a town in search of a reason to exist.
