Long before the vineyards, this was the country of the Wappo. The Napa Valley Wappo lived in the valley and its surrounding hills for thousands of years, fishing the Napa River and its creeks, gathering acorns in the oak woodlands, and trading across the coast ranges. They knew this ground in fine detail centuries before the first survey stake went in, and an honest history of St. Helena begins with them — not as a footnote to the wine story, but as the valley's first and longest chapter.
The mountain's literary ghost is Robert Louis Stevenson. In the summer of 1880, broke and newly married, the young Scottish writer spent his honeymoon squatting in an abandoned miners' bunkhouse on the slopes of Mount St. Helena, at the played-out Silverado mine. He wrote the months up in The Silverado Squatters, and it was there, tasting the valley's young wines, that he set down the line wine country has quoted ever since — that wine is "bottled poetry." The peak and a state park on its flank both carry his memory today.
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.
