Bellefonte, Pennsylvania

Bellefonte owes its name and its fortune to a spring. The Big Spring at the heart of this Centre County borough releases millions of gallons of water every single day, and the story goes that when French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand passed through in the seventeen nineties, he looked at the torrent and exclaimed, in French, la belle fonte, meaning the beautiful fountain. James Dunlop laid out the town in seventeen ninety-five and the name stuck.

That spring powered iron furnaces, and in the early eighteen hundreds, Bellefonte's forges made it an important iron-making center. The wealth built a remarkable downtown of Victorian and Georgian architecture that still stands today, nine miles northeast of Penn State.