9 Fairy-Tale Small Towns In Pennsylvania
Concrete castles and gas-lit lamps: this is the fairy-tale end of Pennsylvania. Wellsboro burns real gas flames behind the glass of its Main Street lamps every evening. Ligonier keeps life-sized nursery-rhyme characters in a forest you enter through a giant book. Jim Thorpe stacks its rooflines up the walls of a narrow mountain gap. Each of these nine small towns earns the storybook comparison a different way, and every one of them is real.
Jim Thorpe
Wedged into a mountain gap with nowhere to build but up, Jim Thorpe stacks itself against the hillside like a set piece. The Asa Packer Mansion, an 1861 grand villa of 18 rooms, sits almost exactly as its owner left it, wallpaper, furnishings, and Gilded Age artifacts intact. Next door, the Harry Packer Mansion Inn runs as a bed and breakfast with tall ceilings and marble fireplaces, and it looks so much the part that it reportedly inspired the design of Walt Disney World's Haunted Mansion.
Follow the stone footpath down the hill to St. Mark's and St. John's Episcopal Church, heavy with stonework, stained glass, and steep gables. Then close the day on the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway, a narrated ride through rock cliffs, dense pine, and roaring rapids.
Milford
An hour north in the Pocono Mountains, Milford went all-in on European grandeur. The proof is Grey Towers, the ancestral home of a former Pennsylvania governor, built with circular turrets, a stone facade, and formal gardens that could pass for a French chateau. Downtown, Forest Hall Studios fills a massive 19th-century bluestone building with galleries and creative workshops.
At the center of town, the Italianate Hotel Fauchere has been putting up guests since the 1800s in rooms that trade rustic for luxurious. And for the nature payoff, Raymondskill Falls, the tallest waterfall in the state, drops 150 feet across three tiers through a canopy of oak, maple, and birch.
New Hope
South along the Delaware River in Bucks County, New Hope leans right out over the water, a canal-side village of wooden footbridges and stone storefronts. Delaware Canal State Park cuts straight through the center, its hand-cut stone locks and arched bridges framed by spring green or autumn gold depending on your timing. Follow the towpath to the Bucks County Playhouse, where live theater runs inside a converted 1790 gristmill at the river's edge.
Across Main Street, the Parry Mansion Museum walks you through eleven rooms decorated era by era, Colonial to Federal, inside a preserved Georgian home with a garden to match. When you are ready to wind down, the 1870 Wedgwood Inn hands you a room in a blue Victorian house full of original art and antiques.
Doylestown
Ten miles west of New Hope stands a town with three castles, all poured from concrete by one obsessive man, Henry Chapman Mercer. Start at Fonthill Castle, his 44-room home with 18 fireplaces and more than 200 windows, none of it quite lining up with anything else. A mile away, the Mercer Museum rises six stories and holds over 40,000 early American artifacts. The third piece of the set is the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, a medieval-looking working museum where you can watch tiles being made the old way and buy one to carry home.
Even the playground plays along. At Kids Castle in Central Park, children scale a 35-foot tower complete with wooden turrets, bridges, and slides.
Bedford
Bedford keeps an entire earlier century parked at its edge. Old Bedford Village gathers dozens of log and stone structures from the 1700s and 1800s, and costumed guides work them for real, blacksmithing, throwing pottery, demonstrating the crafts that built the place. You enter through the Claycomb Covered Bridge, a timber span with a wooden arch that functions like a portal to the world on the other side.
Cap the visit at the Omni Bedford Springs Resort, where grand columns and white colonnaded porches face the mountain valley. The whole property is built around mineral springs long rumored to heal what ails you.
Wellsboro
Wellsboro still lights Main Street with gas. Real flames flicker behind the glass of the street lamps from dusk on, and the effect is exactly as storybook as it sounds. At the center of town sits a green called, fittingly, The Green, where a cast-bronze fountain shows the children from the lullaby "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" sailing off in a wooden shoe, all of it against the stone face of the Tioga County Courthouse. Across the street, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, finished in 1899, adds fieldstone walls, a copper roof, and a square bell tower.
The old-fashioned streak runs out of town too. The Ole Covered Wagon Tours carries riders along the floor of Pine Creek Gorge in horse-drawn wagons, with waterfalls on the spring and summer routes.
Ligonier
Ligonier did not settle for looking like a fairy tale. It built one. At Idlewild, the Story Book Forest greets you with a giant book that serves as the literal entrance, opening onto life-sized characters and replica houses from the nursery rhymes you grew up on.
In the town center, The Diamond sits on a circular lawn under an ornate Victorian bandstand capped with a copper dome. Come January, the Ligonier Ice Fest fills the streets with giant ice sculptures that turn genuinely magical once they are lit at night. A few steps on, Fort Ligonier, a full reconstruction of the British fort on its original 18th-century ground, stands in for the castle, right down to the costumed performers re-enacting historic battles on the right weekend.
Lititz
Some people call Lititz a snow globe come to life; others reach for Hallmark movie. Either way, the town is laid out around a natural mineral spring and a core of 18th-century stone buildings. Lititz Springs Park sends clear spring water through a channel crossed by stone bridges and patrolled by resident ducks, with a welcome center built as a replica Victorian Gothic train depot.
Less than a ten-minute walk away, the 1787 Lititz Moravian Church shows off a multi-tiered white cupola and open belfry arches. And right nearby is the real prize: the Julius Sturgis Pretzel Bakery, the first commercial pretzel bakery in the United States, still standing in the 1784 stone cottage built from rock dug out of the very street it faces.
Ridgway
Up against the Allegheny National Forest on the Clarion River, Ridgway built its looks on lumber money. The Lily of the Valley National Historic District alone lines the streets with over 700 properties, Queen Anne mansions and Italianate villas among them, and Millionaire's Row still carries the estates the oil and lumber barons put up at the height of their fortunes.
At the center stands the 1880 Elk County Courthouse, red brick and stone masonry under a central clock tower that rises over the landscaped lawns. The fairy-tale note holds at the 1865 Bella Mansion B&B, an Italianate villa where the guest rooms keep their Victorian furnishings.
Exploring Pennsylvania, One Fairy Tale at a Time
From the Poconos to the Alleghenies, these nine towns spin their storybook out of real material: concrete castles, gas flames on Main Street, covered bridges you walk through like portals. Doylestown has the castles, Wellsboro has the flickering streets, Ridgway has the Victorian grandeur, and each of the rest has its own version of the trick. The best part is that none of it is staged. Set foot in any one of them and the magic turns out to have been sitting there the whole time.
