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.
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.
