Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in St. Helen, MI

St. Helen is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Richfield Township, Roscommon County, in Michigan's northern Lower Peninsula lake country.

St. Helen takes its name from Lake St. Helen, which French voyageurs are believed to have named for Saint Helena of Constantinople, the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine.

In the 1870s lumber baron Henry Stephens established a lumber operation at St. Helen that was considered among the largest and best equipped in Michigan, and its mills produced more than 1 billion board feet of lumber in about fourteen years.

The St. Helen Development Company spent seven years selling 80,000 acres of the cutover land and helped build more than 30 miles of roads and over 80 miles of fencing to promote settlement.

The 2020 census counted 2,735 people in St. Helen living in 1,380 households, with a median age of 54.1 years, reflecting its character as a lake and retirement community.

Nearly half of St. Helen's housing is seasonal: of its 2,567 housing units in 2020, 46.2% were vacant, most of them lake cottages held for recreational use.

St. Helen covers 6.62 square miles, of which about 13% is water, including its shoreline on Lake St. Helen.

Actor Charlton Heston spent part of his childhood in St. Helen, and the community's charter school, the Charlton Heston Academy, is named after him.

The railroad that built through St. Helen began as the Detroit, Bay City and Alpena Railroad and survives today as the Lake State Railway, while the old M-76 highway through town is still partly signed as "Old 76."