Downtown helen is a busier place in this picture, taken in about 1915 from a vantage point near the old iron bridge. The luxurious Mountain Ranch Hotel stands where Pete's Park is today, poles support electric and phone wires, and Main Street offers a public well and watering trough for the horses and mules which still powered most transportation. Electricity was supplied by a steam generator at the sawmill. The lights would begin to blink each evening at 9:55PM before the power was turned off at 10PM. Helen had three telephones; those at the sawmill office and the Mountain Ranch Hotel were private, but the public had access to the phone at Lawrence Vandiver's drugstore on Main Street.