Adamstown, Pennsylvania
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
Adamstown sits on the Lancaster and Berks County line and has a simple secret: on any given Sunday morning it fills with more antiques per square mile than almost any place in the country. The borough incorporated in eighteen fifty, but its reputation as Antiques Capital of the United States came much later, when dealers began gathering here in the nineteen fifties and sixties, drawn by cheap real estate and a central location between Philadelphia and Harrisburg. By the nineteen eighties, multiple large antique malls, markets, and hundreds of individual dealers packed a town of fewer than two thousand residents.
Route Two Seventy-Two, the road through town, became known along the antique circuit simply as Antiques Row. Weekend foot traffic routinely swells the tiny borough's population tenfold.
