The 8 Can't-Miss Towns In Pennsylvania

In most Pennsylvania downtowns, you get a pleasant hour of storefronts and then nothing much past the last block. The eight here are different. Walk down Broadway in Jim Thorpe and you reach a rail platform where a steam engine is already loading passengers for a run up the Lehigh gorge. In Lititz, you can twist your own dough in the 1861 bakery that made pretzels a business, then browse a chocolate maker still under the old Wilbur name a block on. On the square in Gettysburg, a coffee and a bookstore sit five minutes from the fields of July 1863. In each of these towns, the most interesting part is not behind a ticket booth on the edge of town but at the far end of the main street and a good deal beyond it.

Jim Thorpe

They call Jim Thorpe the "Switzerland of America," and the nickname is not all marketing: the town is stacked up the walls of a steep river gorge, its Victorian downtown set along Broadway between the old rail station and the mountains. The signature ride is the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway, which rolls out of Jim Thorpe Station on a narrated round trip along the Lehigh River, over bridges and through forest most people only ever see from the train. Up on the hill sits the Asa Packer Mansion, the 1861 Italianate home of the railroad magnate who built the town's fortune, its rooms preserved down to the original furnishings. Back on Broadway, the restaurants, galleries, and steep side streets are worth an afternoon of wandering, and Moya turns out seasonal dinners in a snug historic building off the busier stretch.

Lititz

Lititz has a solid claim to a genuine American first. The Julius Sturgis Pretzel Bakery on East Main Street opened in 1861 as the country's first commercial pretzel bakery, and it is still run by the Sturgis family; take the tour and you will twist your own dough before you shop. A block on, Wilbur Chocolate keeps the old Wilbur name and its signature Wilbur Buds going in a retail shop near the original factory, a century-plus of Pennsylvania chocolate in candy form. When you have had enough of the storefronts, Lititz Springs Park sits at the west end of downtown, a spring-fed stream with stone bridges, shade, and enough ducks to keep a kid busy while you claim a bench and do nothing at all.

New Hope

The old canal-town bones are still visible all over New Hope. Main Street runs right along the Delaware River, and the towpath of the old canal still runs through the borough, where four original locks and the restored Locktender's House survive from its shipping days. The best-known building is the Bucks County Playhouse, a professional theater that has staged productions inside a former riverside gristmill for decades. For lunch, Ferry Market gathers a batch of vendors under one roof near the water, which makes feeding a group painless. And the New Hope Railroad still runs excursions out of its 19th-century station into the Bucks County countryside, some behind a steam engine, some behind diesel, depending on the day.

Gettysburg

Everything in Gettysburg orbits three days in July 1863. Lincoln Square sits at the walkable center, ringed by shops, restaurants, and buildings that stood through the battle, among them the Dobbin House Tavern, a stone building finished in 1776 and now the oldest structure in town. A few minutes out, Gettysburg National Military Park spreads across the fields, ridges, and monuments of the battlefield, with a National Cemetery and a museum that lay out the scale of the fighting; the park roads connect Little Round Top, Cemetery Ridge, and Devil's Den to the streets you walked first. For the human scale of it, the Shriver House Museum tells the Civil War through one family's home, right down to the Confederate sharpshooters who set up in the attic and fired on the Union line from the windows.

Wellsboro

Gas lamps still light Main Street in Wellsboro, which sets the tone before you have even parked. The center of town is old-school comfort: the Wellsboro Diner serves breakfast and comfort food out of a 1938 Sterling dining car, and the Arcadia Theatre keeps its downtown marquee lit with movies and live shows after the shops close. But the real reason to come is ten miles west. Leonard Harrison State Park sits on the east rim of Pine Creek Gorge, its 585 acres of overlooks facing straight down into the canyon locals call the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, with Pine Creek down along the forested floor far below. Down in the gorge itself, the Pine Creek Rail Trail runs flat and easy for miles, a second act once you have had your fill of the view from the top.

Lancaster

Lancaster is the biggest name on this list, and the best of it clusters right at the center of town. On Penn Square sits Central Market, chartered in 1730 and billed as the oldest continuously operating farmers market in the country, where roughly 60 vendors work an 1889 brick market house on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, selling everything from Pennsylvania Dutch produce and meats to pierogi and empanadas. A couple of blocks over on North Prince Street, the Fulton Theatre has been staging shows since 1852 and claims the title of oldest continuously operating theater in America, a 1964 National Historic Landmark built on the foundation of a pre-Revolutionary jail. The blocks between them hold the rest: galleries, the Demuth Museum in the home of modernist painter Charles Demuth, and enough independent kitchens to make dinner a hard choice. Park once and you can spend the whole day on foot.

Milford

Milford is the Gilded Age at a small-town scale. Broad Street runs past stone buildings, Victorian houses, and big old trees, and the Milford Diner keeps the historic district fed with breakfast and comfort plates. The landmark is Grey Towers, the 1886 estate of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist who became the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service; the mansion, gardens, and grounds are open for tours and tell the story of American conservation from the place it partly began. The other draw is water. A short, steep trail off Raymondskill Road drops to Raymondskill Falls, a three-tiered cascade of about 150 feet that is the tallest waterfall in Pennsylvania, with viewing platforms at the top and middle of the drop.

Bedford

Bedford sits on some of the oldest travel routes through the Alleghenies, and it has the roadside history to show for it. Juliana Street runs through a historic center of brick sidewalks, stone buildings, and courthouse blocks, and just outside downtown the Jean Bonnet Tavern has served food and put up travelers in a 1760s stone building at a Lincoln Highway crossroads ever since, goat paddock out back and all. The Fort Bedford Museum covers the town's turns as a French and Indian War outpost and a staging ground for the Whiskey Rebellion, when Washington himself rode through with the militia. For the full time-machine effect, Old Bedford Village recreates an early Pennsylvania settlement with log cabins, a schoolhouse, workshops, and costumed interpreters demonstrating old trades. And keep an eye out for the Coffee Pot, a 1927 roadside building shaped exactly like its name, saved and restored on the edge of town.

Pennsylvania Beyond the Highway

None of these towns is a museum piece. The trains still run in Jim Thorpe, the bakeries still turn out pretzels in Lititz, and in Bedford you can still get a drink in a tavern older than the country. What they have in common is a payoff that is not tucked behind a ticket booth somewhere but out at the end of Main Street and past it, in a gorge or a battlefield or on a canyon rim. Pick one for a weekend, and you will likely find a second and third reason to stay before you are through with the first.