Drums, Pennsylvania: One Family, One Hundred Years of Mail

In the late seventeen hundreds, George Drum bought land in the Nescopeck Valley of Luzerne County and put down roots so deep the valley eventually took his name. The Drum family became the community's backbone. They served as justices of the peace, ran the hotel, and held the postmaster's chair for nearly a century.

When a post office was established here in eighteen twenty-six, it operated under Drum family management for about one hundred years straight. The apostrophe that once marked it as Drum's eventually fell away, and the place became simply Drums. Today it is an unincorporated community on the edge of the Sugarloaf Valley, sitting at roughly fifteen hundred feet elevation above the Susquehanna lowlands.

Not every town gets its name from a family dynasty, but Drums is one that did.