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But it was wine that made the valley's name. By the 1860s and 1870s, growers had learned that the gravelly upper-valley benches and warm days were close to ideal for the vine, and a cluster of stone wineries rose around the town — some of the oldest in California, built of hand-cut stone with cellars dug back into the hillsides to hold the cool. Prohibition nearly killed the whole enterprise in the 1920s, and only a handful of cellars survived by making sacramental and medicinal wine; the revival that began in the 1960s turned the Napa Valley, with St. Helena at its heart, into one of the most famous wine regions on earth.
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.
