A long and successful marriage of town and gown has contributed to Lewisburg's ability to thrive as a small town. Despite disastrous floods in 1865, 1889, 1936, and 1972, Lewisburg retains its handsome nineteenth-century architecture, and its commercial district on...
The formation of Snyder County in 1855 was celebrated as a triumph for the German population, the working class, and regional politics. The county was named to honor Simon Snyder (1759–1819), the third post-Revolutionary governor of Pennsylvania, the first of German ancestry, and the...
The west bank of the Susquehanna River in Snyder County is distinguished by several tiny towns along U.S. 11/15, including McKees Half Falls and Chapman. McKees Half Falls is a mixture of plain houses and the ostentatious late Greek Revival brick hotel (1845)...
Selinsgrove was founded in 1787 by Governor Simon Snyder's brother-in-law, Major Anthony Selin, a Swiss mercenary who fought at the side of General Washington in the Revolution. He purchased the long peninsula inaccurately called the Isle of Que from the estate of the...
Prior to 1917, Middleburg was two separate towns on opposite sides of Middle Creek. In 1800 Captain Frederick Evans, builder of Fort McHenry, laid out a town north of the creek for Johann Albrecht Schweinforth, a German landowner and tavern keeper, called Swinefordstown until 1825...
Enclosed by Tuscarora, Conococheague, and Blue mountains, Perry County has the most dramatic scenery of the ridge and valley region. Looking toward Perry's eastern boundary on the Susquehanna River, the succession of majestic hills rising above four water gaps seems more like a...
Situated where Little Buffalo Creek meets the Juniata River, the town, originally named Reider's Ferry, was founded in 1804. When the canal was built along Front Street in 1830, it was renamed Newport and rapidly developed into a regional commercial and industrial hub....
Planned in 1824 to serve as the county seat, New Bloomfield is a genteel town with globed lampposts and shade trees lining the streets. Unlike Millerstown (1790) and Newport (1804), New Bloomfield's location between a creek and the foot of a hill could not accommodate the...
For twenty years the residents living in the eastern half of Mifflin County campaigned for their own county. Geographic isolation generated solidarity among the inhabitants who resented the treacherous journey along the Juniata River and through the gorge known as the Lewistown...
With a backdrop of mountains, Mifflintown is one of eastern Pennsylvania's most picturesque county seats. It faces Mifflin (originally named Patterson) situated on the opposite bank of the Juniata River. Alexander Lafferty settled in present-day Mifflintown in 1755 on...
Mifflin County was formed from Cumberland and Northumberland counties in 1789 and included all of Juniata County until 1831. It was named for Major General Thomas Mifflin, who had just become the first governor of Pennsylvania (1790–1799). When the first settlers ventured into the...
When Mifflin County was established, the county seat was laid out by surveyors Samuel Edmiston and James Potter on the site of Ohesson in 1790. Known as Pokeytown, it was renamed for local ironmaster William Lewis, founder of Hope Furnace and a member of the Pennsylvania...
The Amish and Mennonite region of Mifflin County is less well known than the “Dutch Country” of Lancaster and Berks counties and thus far has escaped commercialization. The picturesque rural town of Belleville sits in a patchwork quilt of farmland. It was known as...
The northeastern section of Pennsylvania known as the “anthracite region” contains the world's largest concentration of anthracite coal, a high-carbon coal that burns cleanly and at high temperature. Anthracite is, therefore, highly...
County text and building entries by Robert Janosov, Lawrence M. Newman, and George E. Thomas
The land that is now Schuylkill County was acquired by the Penn family in a 1749 treaty with the Five Nations that expanded the area for settlement past the first tier of...
The first settler, George Orwig, built a house here in 1747; his sons laid out the town with its central market square in 1796. When the county was formed in 1811, it became the first county seat, a role that ended in 1851 when county government moved to the more central Pottsville...
Eli Bowen, in his Pictorial Sketchbook of Pennsylvania (1852), described Pottsville as “the great theatre of the anthracite coal trade,” with a population of 8,000 in a booming industrial town dominated by the “loud puff of the collier steam-engines, and the shrill...
Tamaqua began as a water-powered mill town, but by the middle of the nineteenth century was caught up in the coal boom. The village was laid out in 1829, and by the 1840s there was so much demand for space that the town moved the course of the Schuylkill River by filling...
Mahanoy City was platted in 1859 and immediately boomed. Demolition and aluminum siding have clouded much of the physical presence of its early days, soaked in the turmoil of the Molly Maguires. Nevertheless, a few buildings stand out, among them the Elks building (1914, Edward Z...
Once, Shenandoah was the most densely populated square mile in Pennsylvania, a breathtaking Babel of coal miners and their families who had roots in the British Isles and eastern Europe. By the 1890s, though, a quarter of its population was drawn from Lithuania and the...
County text and building entries by George E. Thomas and Robert Janosov
The region that is now Carbon County was originally part of Northampton County and because of its relative isolation beyond the Blue Mountain it was settled slowly. Moravians settled in what is now...
Alfred Mathews and Austin Hungerford's (1884) account of Mauch Chunk captured the picturesque setting that gave the city its nickname of “the Switzerland of America.”
Immediately in front [of Bear Mountain] flows the Lehigh, its channel forming a...
West of Jim Thorpe on U.S. 209, the coal mining and processing village of Lansford, once the center of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company's mining operations, dominates Panther Valley. Here can be seen the continued influence of the coal industry with operating coal breakers,...
County text and building entries by Lawrence M. Newman And Robert Janosov
Luzerne County, the oldest of northeastern Pennsylvania counties with the richest architectural heritage, was carved out of Northumberland County in 1786 and named in honor of the Chevalier de...
Wilkes-Barre is the oldest town in northeastern Pennsylvania. Named by its secession-minded Yankee founders to honor John Wilkes (1727–1797) and Isaac Barre (1726–1802), the two members of the British Parliament most vocal in support of the colonial cause in the late eighteenth...
Ashley had its beginnings with an 1851 coal mine that generated the adjacent village of Scrabbletown, whose named was changed to Coalville and later to Ashley. Three miles south of Wilkes-Barre, it is now virtually a southern extension of the city. It continues the mass of...
One of the Wyoming Valley's earliest towns, Kingston developed around the settlement at Kingston Corners, the intersection of the Great Road and the road across the river flats leading to Wilkes-Barre. It grew as a streetcar suburb of Wilkes-Barre. The Tudor Revival Frances Dorrance...
The twin towns of Pittston and West Pittston sit near the confluence of the Susquehanna and Lackawanna rivers. Pittston is dominated by several fine churches, including two with twin towers: Edwin Forrest Durang's St. John the Evangelist (1893; William and Church...
Bear Creek's lakeside setting belies its origins as an industrial village—the personal fiefdom of Albert Lewis, “the Lumber and Ice King of Luzerne County,” whose ice-cutting operations used the lake as a production site, shipping ice cakes via railcar to distant cities. Lewis's own...
A city sits atop the desolate Broad Mountain Plateau because of the ambitions of a classic self-made man, Ario Pardee. A surveyor, Pardee arrived as an employee of the Philadelphia investors who had, in 1836, begun to build the Beaver Meadows Railroad in order to exploit coal deposits...
