Lebanon County was formed in 1813 out of portions of Dauphin and Lancaster counties and was named for the central township. Like many Germansettled districts, its founders chose a name associated with the Holy Lands for the principal city. Geographically it is a continuation of Berks...
North of Millbach, U.S. 422 follows the route of the early-nineteenth-century turnpike that linked Lebanon with Harrisburg and Reading. Here, off PA 419, the landscape is free of billboards and commercial ephemera, making it possible to focus on the working farms and small villages...
Among Schaefferstown's claims to fame is its early public water works, a gravity-fed system of a reservoir and wooden pipes that brought water from a nearby spring to the town center. The Fountain Company was founded by 1750 and was given with its spring to the community in 1763...
Named for the southwest corner of Britain, Cornwall became one of the premier American iron-producing districts because of its rich surface deposits of magnetite. The hills have been mined into a vast depression that is now a water-filled pit and disguises the connection between Miners...
Located on Quittapahilla Creek, Lebanon was founded as Steitztown in the 1750s. Originally, it must have been rather like Schaefferstown with a market square in a grid of streets and a Lutheran church at its heart. With the addition of county government in 1813 Lebanon grew, but not...
Founded in 1785 and named for Louis XVI, the French king who supported American independence, Dauphin County embodies many of the contradictions that are shared throughout eastern Pennsylvania. Both rural and urban and settled by German and Scots-Irish pioneers, it epitomizes the...
In 1705, John Harris was licensed to trade on the Susquehanna River and he promptly built the stockaded log house and peltry sheds from which Harrisburg emerged. His son-in-law and subsequent U.S. senator William Maclay laid out the village plat in 1785. His shrewd...
Hershey marks the intersection of agriculture and industry in the factories that are still among the world's largest producers of chocolate. After modest success in Lancaster as a producer of caramels, Milton Hershey returned to his hometown to take advantage of the connection between...
York County was organized in 1749 as the first of the new counties created when William Penn's sons acquired lands “on both sides of the river Susquehanna.” The river forms its east boundary, while the Mason-Dixon Line establishes a southern edge with Maryland. The northwest border...
Thomas Penn permitted Baltzer Spangler to establish the first town west of the Susquehanna River in 1740. Laid out by surveyor Thomas Cookson in 1741, York followed the Lancaster simplification of the Philadelphia plan with a single center square amidst an expansive grid of streets. The...
The second largest of York County's towns, Hanover was built at an important crossroad linking Gettysburg to the west, Carlisle to the north, and Baltimore, York, and Frederick to the south. Like York, it is on the Monocacy Road, but when Robert McCallister laid out “McCallister's Town...
Cumberland County was created in 1750, and for a time it spanned from the western edge of Bucks County to the farthest western end of the Penn family's claim, incorporating what are now Berks and Dauphin counties, and as far west as Washington County in a region described as the “...
Boiling Springs’ name is derived from the roiling trout-filled waters of the limestone stream that passes through its center. An important water-powered gristmill stands at the south end of the village, with the arched entrance of the millrace still evident. It was for this...
When it was decided to create a new proprietary town at Carlisle, its planner, John Armstrong, followed the model of Lancaster with a central square (CU3) intersected by the principal streets whose greater width established...
Adams County is bordered on the east by York County, while its south border is a continuation of the Mason-Dixon Line that established the Maryland–Pennsylvania boundary. The so-called East Big Flat Ridge of Piney Mountain bounds it on the northwest. Because of its different underlying...
New Oxford, like Abbottstown, has a central square as its principal feature, but here there is a considerable economic center with shops, two turn-of-the-twentieth-century banks with entrances on the beveled corner like Frank Furness's post–Civil War buildings in Philadelphia, a...
Traveling from the east, Franklin County begins the frontier which is evident in the rising landforms that frame it on the north and west, as well as by the buildings of the Scots-Irish settlers, particularly their oldest landmarks, the Presbyterian churches. Arriving from the west,...
Founded in 1782, Greencastle is a handsome, largely preserved Philadelphiaplan village that reflects in its mid-nineteenth-century buildings the impact of the construction in 1840 and the rehabilitation in 1859 of the Cumberland Railroad that linked Chambersburg to Hagerstown,...
Pennsylvania 16 passes through a fertile valley with numerous German barns to this picture-perfect village that could be the setting for an American version of Tom Brown's Schooldays. Centered on Main Street is a town square that is intersected east–west by Seminary Street...
And when I asked the name of the river from the brakeman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. That was the name, as no other...
Northumberland County, established in 1772 from parts of Northampton, Berks, Lancaster, Cumberland, and Bedford counties, was the last county founded by the Penn family. Thomas and Richard Penn Sr. acquired the territory with the New Purchase of 1768, and named it after the...
Mount Carmel is known as the “Town of Many Churches” for its skyline filled with the spires of twenty-three churches crammed into one square mile. The discovery of anthracite in the 1840s made the site ripe for development. Local politicians and entrepreneurs quickly formed a land...
Sunbury was built on the eastern bank of the Susquehanna just below the forks. On the earliest map of the region, drawn by Isaac Taylor c. 1727, the site is identified as “Mikquar Town,” a name for a Susquehannock village. Native Americans called it “Shamokin” (not to be...
This picturesque historic town is located at what is known as the “Forks,” the place where the West and North branches of the Susquehanna River converge. John Lowden and William Patterson acquired the tract from Thomas Penn in 1772 and laid it out around a common green in the...
Herbert Bell's History of Northumberland County (1891) describes Milton as “the commercial, educational, and religious center of this region.” Founded on the West Branch Susquehanna River in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Milton burgeoned following the...
During the War of 1812, residents living along the West Branch Susquehanna River in Northumberland County battled the state legislature for separate county status. The following year, the patriotically named Union County was created out of the western half of Northumberland, giving...
Winfield was a tiny hamlet on the Susquehanna River known only as the site of the last Indian massacre in the county until iron ore was discovered in the Shamokin Ridge in the 1840s. The Union Furnace, established at nearby Turtle Creek in 1854, grew to be one of the largest in the...
In 1792 George Long, a German from Lancaster County, finally accomplished what colonists had tried to achieve for four decades: a permanent settlement on Penns Creek (the apostrophe was removed by act of legislature in 1802). Longa Stettle (in English, Long's Town)...
Once famous as the “Buggy Capital” of Pennsylvania, Mifflinburg was a national center in manufacturing carriages, wagons, and sleighs in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was a logical industry for a town built on the main lines of the turnpikes that connected the...
Some time before the Civil War, Charles Dreisbach, descendant of a German settler, constructed the Great Western Hotel on the Lewisburg-Youngmanstown turnpike (PA 45). A village sprang up around this hostelry, and in 1865 Joseph S. Raudenbush opened a general store here...
