The Unicoi Turnpike: A Thousand-Year-Old Road Under a Bavarian Village
Near Helen, Georgia
Beneath the Bavarian storefronts and the painted woodwork, Helen sits on one of the oldest roads in the eastern United States. The Unicoi Turnpike was already a thousand-year-old trail when it was first documented by Europeans. It followed a route through the Blue Ridge Mountains connecting Cherokee towns in Tennessee with the headwaters of the Savannah River in Georgia, linking communities on both sides of the mountains in a trading network that moved deer hides, salt, copper, and other goods across the Appalachians.
In eighteen thirteen, the Cherokee agreed by treaty to a toll road along the Unicoi Turnpike, with annual payments promised to the tribe that were reportedly never made. The road passed through the Nacoochee Valley on its path through Unicoi Gap and north toward Tennessee. Within a generation of that decision, the Cherokee were gone.
The Unicoi Turnpike became a road through former Cherokee land, used by settlers, gold rush miners, and eventually the timber companies that founded Helen. The Bavarian village of today occupies the same corridor the Cherokee formalized as a road, on ground they had traveled for centuries, through mountains they called home.
