Helen and her family were also close friends with the family of Ellen Axson (later Ellen Wilson), whose father was pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Rome, Georgia. During an 1883 visit to his Bones cousins in Georgia, Woodrow Wilson first met Ellen Axson in the home of Helen's older sister Jessie Bones Brower. This first meeting was followed by an impromptu picnic; eight-year-old Helen rode along on the young couple's seven-mile wagon trip to the picnic site.
