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White County
The Mountain Traveler • Fall 2013
Oktoberfest, which began in 1970, gradually evolved into a six-week-long festival celebrated in Bavarian-themed Helen by locals and tourists alike. File photo
Helen’s Bavarian makeover An idea that saved a town
T
ravelers who unexpectedly come through the city of Helen are often surprised to find what appears to be a Bavarian village. After all, most of the settlers in southern Appalachia were Scotch-Irish, not German. So how did Helen get its charming “Alpine” theme – not to mention its famous Oktoberfest? It all started with a town that was in its death throes. Helen was founded in 1913 in response to a timber boom in the Northeast Georgia mountains. The Byrd-Matthews Lumber Company had built a sawmill nearby
By DEBBIE GILBERT, White County News
and a railroad to haul the logs to Gainesville. But once the trees were gone, the town lost its lifeblood. Helen became a sleepy community where visitors rarely stopped except to fill up their gas tank on the way to somewhere else. Then, in the late 1960s, a group of local businessmen came up with an idea to revitalize the town: Give Helen a Bavarian makeover. Pete Hodkinson, Jim Wilkins and Bob Fowler, among others, fleshed out the details of the scheme, and they enlisted artist John Kollock to design how the buildings and other structures
should look. The town now has ordinances to ensure all new buildings conform to the Bavarian theme. But in order to seem authentic, the city needed to be German not just in appearance but in personality. Oktoberfest began as an informal gathering in 1970, and gradually evolved into a six-week-long festival of beer drinking, wurst eating, dancing to the beat of oompah bands, and a popular parade. Moreover, Helen formed a partnership with a “sister city:” Fussen, Germany, known for its Baroque castles. This year, the 43rd Oktober-