What's with Mount St. Helena? The town takes its name from the mountain that stands at the head of the valley — Mount St. Helena, a 4,340-foot peak that closes off the upper Napa Valley to the north. (It is not, despite a century of confusion, the volcano: that's Mount St. Helens, a different mountain and a different spelling, a thousand miles up in Washington.) Mount St. Helena is the quiet giant of wine country — the cool night air that slides down off it is part of what makes the grapes here what they are — and, as you'll see, it has its own literary ghost.
American settlers arrived in the upper valley in the 1850s, drawn by deep, well-watered soil and a long growing season. The little town that grew up around a store and a church took the mountain's name, and it was incorporated as the City of St. Helena in 1876. From the start it was an agricultural town first — wheat, cattle, and orchards as much as grapes — set in the narrow, fertile stretch of valley between the Mayacamas range and the Vaca hills, where the road north ran on toward Calistoga and the mountain.
Why People Visit St Helena
St. Helena offers Napa Valley at its most walkable and unhurried — a real town in the middle of the vineyards, with deep wine heritage, a literary past, and the mountain overhead. Visitors come for the tasting country and the scenery and stay for the small-town stone streets and the easy pace. It is refined without being precious, and beautiful in every season.
