Helper Main Street included some of its first wooden buildings, which were later replaced or destroyed in the fire of 1919, while many other buildings on the street survived in some form. At 58 South Main, Louis Fossat, a first-generation Italian immigrant, continuously operated a bakery, meat, and grocery business from 1913 until 1940, serving both the local population and surrounding coal camps by delivery truck. Other Main Street buildings housed a wide variety of businesses and services, including a Japanese fish market, dentist office, beauty shop, hotels, chop suey restaurant, bar, furniture store, mercantile firms, cafes, coffee houses, law offices, drugstore, newspaper office, and rented upstairs rooms, with prostitution also available in several locations. Several prominent buildings were erected from 1908 through the 1920s by individual owners or multiethnic groups of investors, and some later changed uses, such as the hotel at 294 South Main, which the D&RGW Railroad took over in 1942 for train crews before Helper City purchased it in the 1980s and converted it into a museum. Railroad history also shaped Helper through the work of Warren John Kiefer, born September 28, 1920, in Yakima, Washington, who became a railroad fireman and spent decades photographing Utah rail operations; between 1945 and 1951 he made photographs in Helper of Denver and Rio Grande Western steam engines and in 1981 donated many of his photographs to the Loyd Files Research Library of the Museum of Western Colorado in Grand Junction.