Dauphin: French Title on a Pennsylvania River
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
The borough of Dauphin sits on the eastern bank of the Susquehanna River in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, and its name traces back to an unlikely source: the title given to the eldest son of the French king. Dauphin County was created in seventeen eighty-five from Lancaster County, and the new county was named in honor of the French Dauphin , a gesture of goodwill toward the nation that had helped secure American independence just two years earlier. The borough, earlier known as Green's Mill and Port Lyon, later took the county's name.
Settlement here dates to seventeen sixty-five, when the location along the Susquehanna made it a crossing point and a waystation on routes north into the Pennsylvania interior. Today the borough is a quiet Harrisburg suburb along Route Fifteen, the Susquehanna running close beside it, Blue Mountain and the ridges beyond it rising to the north.
