While Helen is known as Georgia's "Alpine Village," the town's origins are more closely related to 17th-century Indian trading paths, gold prospectors, and timber moguls than to settlers of Bavarian or Germanic descent. As far back as the Paleo-Indian period, tribes roamed the areas in and around Helen, and the physical proof of mound-building groups of the Mississippian period is obvious in nearby Nacoochee Valley. In the 1800s, white settlers of...