Helen Annelle Toles Buffington

Helen T. Buffington

Helen Annelle Toles Buffington, 97, of Jefferson, died March 13, 2025, at her home in Jefferson following an extended illness.

Services will be held in the Evans Funeral Home Chapel on Tuesday, March 18 at 2 p.m. Family will receive friends prior to the service at 1 p.m. at Evans Funeral Home. Interment will follow at Woodbine Cemetery in Jefferson.

An icon among newspaper women in Georgia, she worked as a reporter, editor and newspaper co-owner for over seven decades at newspapers in both Northwest and Northeast Georgia.

Helen, or “Mrs. B” as many knew her, was born Oct. 27, 1927, to the late Thomas Taylor and Minnie Lee Sentell Toles in Cherokee County Ala., just across the state line from Menlo, Ga.

She began her newspaper career while still in high school at her hometown newspaper, the Summerville News, where she sold advertising for the paper. She also edited her high school newspaper at that time.

Toward the end of WWII, her family moved temporarily to Marietta where she worked at the Bell Bomber Plant as a secretary and spent one summer there working for the Marietta Daily Journal. She also worked as a stringer for The Atlanta Journal for many years.

Following graduation from Young Harris College in 1946, she worked for the Rome News-Tribune as a reporter for 11 years. While there, she won several Associated Press awards and was featured in the 1950s television series “Big Story” for her articles that had reunited two long-separated sisters. She also astounded her co-workers at Rome by being able to type over 100 words per minute on an old manual typewriter.

While at Rome, she was a member of the Rome Business and Professional Women’s Club and wrote a series of articles about mental health issues in Floyd County, articles that led to the formation of the Floyd County Mental Health Association. Those articles also won her a first-place award from the Georgia Conference on Social Welfare.

In 1960, she and husband Herman A. Buffington went to work for the Summerville News where she won 15 Georgia Press Association awards, including four first place awards.

In 1965, she and Herman purchased The Jackson Herald in Jefferson, a struggling weekly newspaper that had been floundering for several years.

With Helen as editor and Herman as publisher, the two soon turned the operation around. In 1968, they started The Banks County News in Homer. In 1987, the firm purchased The Commerce News in Commerce and a decade later, bought The Madison County Journal in Danielsville. The firm subsequently changed its corporate name to Mainstreet Newspapers, Inc. The company later started the Barrow Journal (now the Barrow News-Journal) and the Braselton News.

During her years as editor, The Herald won numerous state and national awards, including the Freedom Foundation Award from Valley Forge, Pa. She was also inducted into the Georgia Press Association’s Golden Club for having over 50 years in the newspaper business in the state.

Among the major stories she covered during her tenure as editor of The Herald was the 1967 murder of solicitor general Floyd Hoard by local bootleggers. She also crusaded editorially about many issues, including calling for more open government at a time when secret government meetings were commonplace.

After retiring as editor in the mid-1990s, she continued working at the newspaper, overseeing some business functions into her 80s.

In 2001, she and Herman received the William H. Booth Citizenship Award from the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce for their many decades of service to the community.

In addition to her newspaper work, Helen also served terms as a member of the Peace Place board of directors and the Tumbling Waters Society board. She was also a member of the James Pitman Chapter of the DAR, the Jefferson’s Woman’s Club and a longtime member of Jefferson First United Methodist Church where she was in the Stan Esco Sunday School class and a member of Esther Circle. Helen was also a participant in the Athens MADD Victims Impact Panels, the result of having lost her sister, Hazel J. Toles, to a drunk driver in 1954 at the age of 21.

She was also a charter member of the Jackson County Historical Society and a long-time member of the Commerce Public Library’s writing group.

In 2003, she coordinated a self-published history of Mainstreet Newspapers dating back to 1875 when The Jackson Herald was founded.

Shortly after WWII ended, she met the love of her life, Herman Buffington, on a blind date. They were married on April 14, 1949, at a historic small country church near Menlo, Ga. They celebrated their 65^th wedding anniversary shortly before Herman’s death on July 13, 2014.

She loved God, her church and her family. She also loved newspapers and her newspaper work. She had an independent spirit and was ahead of her time as a news reporter at mid-century, a career that was dominated mostly by male news reporters. But she often made it clear she was not a feminist and believed that family should always come first.

She was also keen about genealogy and had done extensive work on her family’s history with documents filling multiple filing cabinets with genealogical information.

She and her husband traveled widely in their later years, spending time in England, Israel, Morocco, Australia, France, Italy and in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain while it was still under Communism. They also traveled to Okinawa where Herman had fought in WWII.

She is survived by two sons, Michael (Mike) Herman Buffington (Alex), of Alto; and Scott Lee Buffington (Wendy), of Jefferson; by her brother, Thomas (Tommy) Taylor Toles, of Jefferson; four grandchildren, Brittany Carmen Buffington Truelove, of Jefferson; Martin (Marty) Lee Buffington, of Jefferson; Blair Michael Buffington, of Patchogue, N.Y., and Clark Thomas Buffington, of Jefferson; two step-grandsons, Jonathon Nix of Jefferson, and Joshua Nix (Elizabeth), of Nicholson; five great-grandchildren, Macy Mae and Max Truelove, both of Jefferson, and Axle, Abel and Ace Buffington, all of Jefferson.

The family would like to express gratitude to her caregivers, Mary Hix, Joy Underwood, Denise Stringer, June Powers, Patricia Tate and Faye Swain.

In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to Jefferson First United Methodist Church, 188 Martin Street, Jefferson, Ga. 30549.