13 Of The Most Adorable Small Towns In Pennsylvania
At Cherry Springs, outside Coudersport, the sky is dark enough that the Milky Way casts a visible shadow on the ground. In Kennett Square they grow roughly half the mushrooms eaten in America. Lititz has been twisting pretzels in the same Main Street bakery since 1861. Pennsylvania's small towns are stranger and more specific than their postcards suggest, and these thirteen each have one thing nowhere else does.
Wellsboro
Wellsboro still lights its main street with gas lamps, which tells you most of what you need to know. The town sits in Tioga County at the edge of Pine Creek Gorge, better known as the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania, a 47-mile cut that reaches about 1,450 feet deep at its deepest point.
Leonard Harrison State Park holds the gorge's east rim across 585 acres, with the overlook a short walk from the parking lot and the Turkey Path dropping steeply to the creek for anyone willing to earn the climb back. Downtown, the Wellsboro Diner has been serving since 1939 in an original dining car, and the Deane Center for the Performing Arts runs music and theater through the year.
Coudersport
Coudersport sits on the Allegheny River in Potter County, a corner of the state locals call God's Country, and its claim to fame happens after dark. Cherry Springs State Park, about twenty miles southeast, is the darkest place in Pennsylvania and arguably the darkest east of the Mississippi.
The park covers only 82 acres but sits at 2,300 feet on the Allegheny Plateau surrounded by 262,000 acres of Susquehannock State Forest, which is why it works. Pennsylvania named it the state's first Dark Sky Park in 2000, and it became only the second International Dark Sky Park in the world, the single Gold Level site on the East Coast. There is no cell service. Two star parties run each year, in June and October, and the Perseids in August draw a crowd. By day, Coudersport's Main Street has the theater and the Potter County Historical Society.
Huntingdon
Huntingdon sits on the Juniata River, but the reason to come is the water south of it. Raystown Lake runs about 28 miles with roughly 118 miles of shoreline, making it the largest lake entirely inside Pennsylvania, and the whole thing is surrounded by federal land, so there are no houses on the bank. That is unusual enough in the East to be worth the drive by itself.
Ridenour Overlook gives the view over the dam without a hike. The Allegrippis Trails above the lake run more than 30 miles of purpose-built singletrack and have a serious reputation among mountain bikers. In town, Juniata College keeps the calendar busy, and the Isett Heritage Museum holds a genuinely overwhelming collection of several tens of thousands of everyday objects from the last two centuries.
Ohiopyle
Ohiopyle has fewer than 100 residents and a 20,000-acre state park wrapped around it, which is about the best ratio in the state. The Youghiogheny River drops through town over Ohiopyle Falls, and the Lower Yough below it is the busiest whitewater run in the East, with outfitters launching all season.
Cucumber Falls drops about 30 feet into a grotto you can walk behind, five minutes from the car. The Great Allegheny Passage runs straight through town on an old rail bed, which means you can ride all the way into Pittsburgh on it, or head the other way toward Washington. And eight miles north at Mill Run, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater is built directly over a waterfall, which is reason enough on its own.
New Hope
New Hope sits on the Delaware opposite Lambertville, with a walking bridge between them, so you can do two states in an afternoon on foot. The town has been an artists' colony since the early 1900s, and the Bucks County Playhouse, in a 1790 grist mill on the riverbank, has been staging work since 1939 with a long record of Broadway tryouts.
The Parry Mansion, built in 1784 for a lumber mill owner, is furnished room by room to show 125 years of changing taste rather than one frozen moment. Just south, Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve protects 134 acres of native Pennsylvania plants inside Washington Crossing Historic Park, where the Continental Army crossed the river on Christmas night in 1776.
Jim Thorpe
The town was called Mauch Chunk until 1954, when it struck a deal with the widow of the Olympian Jim Thorpe to take his remains and his name in exchange for a tomb and the publicity. It worked, after a fashion. The Victorian streets stacked up the narrow Lehigh gorge are the real draw.
The Asa Packer Mansion, finished in 1861 for the man who built the Lehigh Valley Railroad, still holds its original furnishings. The Mauch Chunk Opera House opened in 1881 and is among the oldest vaudeville houses in the country still programming live music. The Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway runs about 16 miles round trip into the gorge in vintage coaches, and the Switchback Gravity Railroad that once ran here was an ancestor of the roller coaster.
Milford
Milford sits above the Delaware at the northern gateway to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Raymondskill Falls, a few minutes south, is the tallest waterfall in Pennsylvania, dropping roughly 150 feet in three tiers with a short steep trail to two viewing platforms.
Grey Towers, the 1886 stone chateau above town, was the home of Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service and twice governor of Pennsylvania. It is a national historic site now, and the grounds are free to walk. The Columns Museum downtown holds the Lincoln Flag, which is said to have cradled the president's head at Ford's Theatre, and Old Lumberyard Antiques handles the shopping.
Lititz
Julius Sturgis opened a pretzel bakery on Main Street in 1861, the first commercial pretzel bakery in America, and the building is still there twisting dough for anyone who wants a lesson. You get a certificate. It is exactly as pointless as it sounds and worth doing anyway.
Moravian settlers laid the town out in 1756, and for its first century you could only live here if you belonged to the church, which is why the street grid and the stone houses along East Main survived so intact. Budget Travel named Lititz the coolest small town in America in 2013 and the place has been busy ever since. The former Wilbur Chocolate factory, whose Wilbur Buds predate the Hershey Kiss, is now a hotel and food hall. Lititz Springs Park sits behind Main Street with the spring that drew the Moravians in the first place, and the town runs one of the older Fourth of July celebrations in the country around it.
Hawley
Hawley sits at the top of Lake Wallenpaupack, a 5,700-acre reservoir built in the 1920s for hydroelectric power and now the Poconos' main body of water, with 52 miles of shoreline. Boat tours run from the lake, and the fishing holds up.
In town, the Hawley Silk Mill is the landmark: an 1880 bluestone building that was once the largest silk mill in the world under one roof and now holds shops, a cafe, and offices. The Ritz Company Playhouse runs community theater in a converted 1920s garage. The whole borough covers less than a square mile.
Kennett Square
Kennett Square calls itself the Mushroom Capital of the World and has the numbers to back it: the farms around it grow roughly half the mushrooms produced in the United States, mostly in windowless cinderblock houses you will drive past without noticing. The Mushroom Festival each September draws tens of thousands, and yes, there is a mushroom drop on New Year's Eve.
Longwood Gardens, just west of town, is the other reason people come. Pierre du Pont bought the property in 1906 to save its trees from a lumber mill and spent decades turning it into something closer to a European estate garden, 1,100 acres with a four-acre conservatory and fountains that perform on a schedule. It is among the most visited gardens in the country.
Columbia
Columbia sits on the Susquehanna in Lancaster County and came within a single vote of a strange fate: in 1789 Congress considered it as the permanent capital of the United States and chose the Potomac instead. The town settled for being a river port and a bridge town.
The National Watch and Clock Museum here holds the largest horological collection in North America, around 12,000 timepieces, and the noise at the top of the hour is worth timing your visit for. Chickies Rock County Park has a bluff overlook 200 feet above the river. Downtown runs a dense cluster of antique markets, including the Burning Bridge, named for the covered bridge militia burned in 1863 to stop Confederate troops crossing toward Lancaster.
Stroudsburg
Stroudsburg is the Monroe County seat and the main street of the Poconos, with a downtown that has kept its independent businesses better than most towns this close to an interstate. The Monroe County Courthouse went up in the 1890s in Romanesque Revival stone and anchors the block.
The Sherman Theater, a restored 1920s movie house, books national touring acts into a town of 6,000, which gives the place a music calendar out of proportion to its size. Main Street carries the bookshops and restaurants, and the Delaware Water Gap is fifteen minutes east when you want the river.
East Stroudsburg
Its neighbor across Brodhead Creek runs on a different rhythm, set by East Stroudsburg University and its several thousand students. The Dansbury Depot, an 1864 station on the old Delaware, Lackawanna and Western line, is the landmark downtown.
Yetter Park follows the creek with trails and fishing access. The Pocono Indian Museum covers the Lenape who lived in this valley for thousands of years before the Walking Purchase of 1737 took the land out from under them, a piece of history the Poconos tourist literature usually skips. Between the two Stroudsburgs you get a college town and a county seat a mile apart.
What These Towns Have In Common
Very little, which is the point. Coudersport has the darkest sky on this side of the country, Kennett Square grows half the nation's mushrooms, Ohiopyle has 100 residents and 20,000 acres, Lititz baked the country's first commercial pretzel, and Columbia nearly became the capital of the United States. Wellsboro still runs gas lamps and Jim Thorpe swapped its name for a dead Olympian. Pick by the oddity rather than the scenery, because in Pennsylvania the scenery is a given and the oddity is what you will actually tell people about.
