Great Bend: Where the Susquehanna Curves

The Susquehanna River makes a broad, sweeping horseshoe bend at the Pennsylvania-New York line, and in the late seventeen eighties the first settlers built cabins at the inside of that curve.

The settlement is said to have gone by another name at first, then the name changed to match what everyone already called the place: Great Bend, for the obvious geography of the river. Timber was among the early trades.

Great Bend Borough was formally incorporated on November nineteenth, eighteen sixty-one, right in the middle of the Civil War. It has always been small, a crossing point rather than a destination, anchored by the river that named it and the Erie Railroad depot that kept it on the map into the twentieth century.