In Appalachia, some counties make coal. Some make whiskey. White County, Georgia, makes things you have to see twice to believe.

Start with the name. White County isn't named for anybody who lived there. It's named for David T. White, a state legislator from Newton County, clear down near Atlanta, who pushed the bill through in 1857 when the locals couldn't get it passed themselves. He greased the wheels. They gave him the county. That's politics, then and now.

The land came out of Habersham County, up in the northeast corner of Georgia where the Blue Ridge finally runs out of steam. Yonah Mountain stands over the east side at 3,156 feet. The Chattahoochee River starts here, at Unicoi Gap, a creek you could step over before it goes off to water Atlanta and half of Alabama.

People have been in these valleys a long time. There's a mound in the Nacoochee Valley, sitting in a pasture beside the highway with a gazebo on top, built by mound-building people centuries before the Cherokee held this ground. The state put up a historical marker telling a love story about a Cherokee princess named Nacoochee and a brave named Sautee. Scholars will tell you most of it is invented. The mound doesn't care. It's been listening to stories longer than we've been telling them.

Then came the gold.

In 1828, somebody found placer gold on a branch of Dukes Creek in the Nacoochee Valley. White County folks will tell you that was the first gold discovered in Georgia, the spark that lit the whole Georgia gold rush, the one that ran the Cherokee out on the Trail of Tears. Lumpkin County next door claims the same title. The two have been arguing about it for two hundred years. Nine mines operated in White County. Men dug here for over a century. In 1889 a fellow named John Phillip Thurmond pulled a nugget out of the Hamby Mines weighing about 25 and a half ounces. Biggest one ever found east of the Mississippi.

My favorite gold story is smaller. In 1896, a young man named James Cicero Allen wanted to marry a Scottish girl named Charistina Davidson. Money was tight. So he took a sluice box to his daddy's farm and panned out enough gold to buy the marriage license. A dollar fifty. He had enough left over for a French harp, some candy, and thirty cents to set up housekeeping.

That's a man who wanted to get married.

Now for the part you won't believe. There's a town in White County called Helen. It was a lumber town, built around a sawmill in 1913, and by the 1960s the mill was long dead and the town was dying with it. Population 227. Tourists blew through on their way to the waterfalls without lifting their foot off the gas.

In January of 1969, three businessmen sat down to lunch and decided to do something about it. They called in an artist named John Kollock, who'd been stationed in Bavaria during his Army days. He sketched the whole main street done over as a German alpine village. Steep roofs. Gingerbread trim. Painted murals. The businessmen looked at the drawings and said, let's do it. No government money. No consultants. Each man paid for his own building. By the fall of 1969, a dying Georgia mill town had turned itself into Bavaria.

It worked. Helen is now the third most visited city in Georgia. Around 500 people live there. Up to a million and a half visit every year, drinking beer at Oktoberfest and floating the Chattahoochee in inner tubes past buildings that look like they were airlifted out of the Alps. Even the gas stations have to look Bavarian. It's zoning law.

Is it authentic? No. Is it something? It is. A town that was going to die decided not to. They just did it in lederhosen.

Down the road in Cleveland, the county seat, the improbable kept coming. In 1977, a local art student at Truett-McConnell College named Xavier Roberts started hand-stitching soft-sculpture dolls he called Little People. He didn't sell them. He adopted them out, birth certificates and all. In 1979 he set up shop in an old medical clinic and called it Babyland General Hospital. By 1983 a toy company had licensed them, renamed them Cabbage Patch Kids, and set off the biggest doll craze in American history. Sixty-five million adopted by 1990. Parents fistfighting in toy store aisles at Christmas, all over a doll born in a converted clinic in Cleveland, Georgia. Babyland is still there, bigger now, staff in scrubs, dolls born from a cabbage patch under a crystal tree five times an hour. Admission's free. Your dignity is negotiable.

And out in the Mossy Creek district, the county was making art before it knew that's what it was called. The Meaders family started turning pots there in 1893. Utilitarian stuff. Churns, jugs, pitchers, the things a farm needed before refrigeration. Lanier Meaders worked the family shop most of his life, a fourth-generation potter and a World War II paratrooper who came home from Germany with nightmares he never shook. In 1967, at age 50, the Smithsonian came calling and Lanier filled an order of face jugs, those homely stoneware jugs with bulging eyes and crooked teeth. He sold them for $2.50 apiece. Before he died in 1998 they were fetching $3,000. One sold at auction not long ago for $22,000. He made maybe 10,000 of them on a foot-powered wheel and called them probably the ugliest thing a person could make. The National Endowment for the Arts gave him its highest honor in folk art anyway.

When you get hungry in White County, skip the bratwurst line in Helen and find the Cottage House Restaurant in Cleveland. Family owned. They roll and hand-cut their own dumplings, boil their own chicken broth, hand-patty the hamburger steaks, and sort their peas and beans by hand. The banana pudding has a local following that borders on religious.

Gold you can't verify. A Bavaria that isn't. Dolls born from cabbages. Ugly jugs worth more than a used truck.

White County's been selling the improbable for two hundred years.

People keep buying.