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HERI TAGE W HELVET IA Helvetia, Rediscovered The documentary Born in a Ballroom celebrates Helvetia and its beloved matriarch, Eleanor Mailloux.
in the 1860s, not long after West Virginia became a state in the Civil War. When Mailloux—then Eleanor Fahrner—was growing up there in the 1920s and ’30s, residents still spoke the Old World language, cooked the foods, and followed the traditions. She grew up, traveled with the Red Cross, married, and had five children. But by the time she divorced and moved back to Helvetia in the 1960s, times had changed. “Things were slipping,” Mailloux explains in an interview recorded half a century later. “Traditions were slipping. Foods were slipping. The old people who were the keepers of these treasures were dying.” Needing an income
and something to do, Mailloux started the restaurant in 1968 with a friend. Although all of that history eventually becomes clear, the film is far from a chronological recitation of events. Born in a Ballroom is above all a poetic remembrance of Mailloux created in fulfillment of a decade-old promise by her granddaughter, Clara Lehmann, and her partner, Jonathan Lacocque, through the production company, Coat of Arms. Arthurdale homesteader Martin Luther Perkins gets a little one-on-one time with Franklin D. Roosevelt during the president’s May 1938 visit. But the film’s premise is that people and place are not separate—that especially for a person of
even if youhaven’tbeentowestvirginia’s famously swiss enclave, Helvetia, yet, you’ve likely heard of The Hütte Restaurant. For those who happen on it while driving the remote Randolph County outskirts of the Monongahela National Forest, the homey, comfortable restaurant is a delightful surprise. For others, it’s a destination in its own right. But for the residents of Helvetia, it’s the heart of the community. As the new documentary film Born in a Ballroom shows, The Hütte and its co-founder and longtime owner Eleanor Mailloux are very much bound up in the town’s history and culture. Helvetia was founded by Swiss immigrants
22 wvl • summer 2020
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