At first glance, Helvetia, nestled in a lush valley near the West Virginia’s Eastern panhandle, appears to be a private, quiet place that you can drive through it in less than a minute — church, general store (doubling as a post office), folk museum, library, community hall, restaurant, 25 or so homes. It has a population of about 150, with folks living on farms outside the town. On my early visits, after the Ramp Supper, my friends and I would head back over the mountains to a seedy motel with an ice machine and a sign that advertised “COLORED TV.”

Then one year I heard there was an inn in Helvetia and stayed on after my friends left. The Beekeeper Inn, an old house at the confluence of two forks of the Buckhannon River, is owned by Eleanor Fahrner Mailloux. Eleanor grew up in Helvetia in the early1920s, left to travel the world, and came back in the early 1960s to help nurture the fragile culture of her childhood — later opening the inn and a nearby restaurant called The Hutte [“little house” in Swiss–German], considered to be the country’s best.

“Even as a small child, I could see how beautiful Helvetia was. I wanted it always to exist; that was my dream.” But there was a danger that it wouldn’t. Like many Appalachian towns, Helvetia had been losing ground over the years, a victim of the state’s struggling economy and changes wrought by an increasingly urbanized society.

Eleanor set out to fight the decline, enlisting the support of Rudolph Zumbach, an old timer and a community leader. “We’re all in favor of progress as long as we don’t make any changes, ” Rudolph said to her. “It sounds funny but I understood what he meant and felt the same way,” Eleanor recalls. “We didn’t want Helvetia’s integrity, its heart, to change.” She has also functioned as a one–woman historical society, organizing the refurbishing of many of the town’s buildings and the landscaping of public areas. Through her efforts, the Village was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.