Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania's Only Town

Pennsylvania has cities. Pennsylvania has boroughs. Pennsylvania has townships.

But it has exactly one town, and you are near it. Bloomsburg on the Susquehanna earned its peculiar legal status on March fourth, eighteen seventy, when the state legislature merged it with the surrounding Bloom Township under a special act of incorporation. Every other community in Pennsylvania that tried a similar maneuver ended up reclassified as a borough, but Bloomsburg slipped through as a town and the law was never applied to anyone else.

The settlement itself dates to Ludwig Eyer's survey in eighteen oh two, but that single quirk of eighteen seventy state law gave it a distinction that has outlasted everything else. Of all the things to be famous for, being the only one of your kind in an entire commonwealth is not a bad start.