Helvetia: The History of a Swiss Village in the Mountains of West Virginia (review)

American immigration history has been dominated by studies of ethnic “ghettos” amid the smokestacks, railroad tracks, and church steeples of urban America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, many immigrants did not settle in large manufacturing cities. Most imagined recreating their home ethnic villages. There still remains limited research on immigrants in rural, mountainous Central Appalachia. David H. Sutton’s newly republished Helvetia provides an exciting story of an overlooked part in America’s immigrant past. Established in 1869 in Randolph County, this Swiss German village forged a unique ethnic identity. By interviewing aging Swiss German immigrants in the late 1970s, Sutton was able to recreate life in Helvetia (xiii). Utilizing those oral interviews, church histories, court documents, archives in Switzerland, and a fascinating array of original photographs and drawings, Sutton’s work will serve as the definitive narrative of this unique Swiss community in the mountains.

Rather than portraying Helvetia in isolation, Sutton places the community within larger migration patterns and compares it to other Appalachian Swiss towns. These Swiss villages shared isolated terrain, a decentralized town layout, and injustices caused by speculative land sales (2). Sutton argues that most of the Swiss Germans, contrary to their image as poor peasants, were dislocated farmers, or lower-class artisans, seeking to escape wage labor in a rapidly industrializing Switzerland (5). Sutton is at his best in weaving together narratives connecting events in diverse places such as Bern, Switzerland, Brooklyn, New York, and Randolph County, West Virginia. Sutton adds new insights into Helvetia’s founding by downplaying the role of West Virginia state officials, while focusing on the Swiss German Grütliverein mutual aid society in Brooklyn. This society provided necessary funds to attract eager pioneering Swiss from smog-filled Brooklyn. Sutton’s most fascinating research examines how Helvetia’s early years were plagued by land speculation and fraudulent accounting by the notorious Karl Lutz, which could have spelled doom to the settlement in the 1870s (16–21).

Helvetia was, in Sutton’s words “a kind of German Swiss melting pot and microcosm of German Swiss emigration” (28). One learns about transplanted Swiss farming techniques of conserving soil and how favorable mountain climates assisted in the Helvetians’ long life spans. In well-structured chapters on community building, agricultural traditions, and outside social forces, Sutton complements the book with dozens of vivid historical photographs highlighting the lived experiences in this “Swiss alpine” village (38).

Sutton also successfully highlights the shift from a subsistence economy to a market economy in the 1890s. The expansion of timber boomtowns like Pickens brought new ethnic workers and new social forces to bear on this isolated Swiss community. Helvetians increasingly produced homegrown cash crops for sale in lumber camps (58). The subsequent creation of farm clubs and cultural associations also helped Helvetians adjust to the Great Depression. However, this market economy brought Helvetia’s decline. First, young Swiss men were attracted by cash wages and began leaving the region by the 1940s. Second, the xenophobia of World War I attacked Swiss cultural traditions and the teaching of German (85). Throughout the book, David Sutton brings new life to a story often neglected by historians of West Virginia. Even though he offers a fascinating narrative, the author could have provided more discussion of the Helvetians’ non-Swiss neighbors, and their own cultural biases, especially during World War I. Even so, by successfully balancing personal stories with detailed historical analysis, Sutton’s work adds complexity to the history of Central Appalachia, West Virginia, and America’s immigrants.