St. Helen, MI

St. Helen is a Roscommon County census-designated place and unincorporated community within Richfield Township. Its defining early chapter came in the 1870s, when lumber baron Henry Stephens established a large mill operation considered among the best equipped in Michigan at the time. The mills were estimated to produce a billion board feet of lumber in fourteen years, and a railroad station tied the timber settlement to the wider region. St. Helen is a northern Michigan place whose map still carries the imprint of timber, rail, and lake-country settlement.