Harveys Lake: Pennsylvania's Resort Era
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
Harveys Lake is one of Pennsylvania's largest natural lakes, and for much of the early twentieth century it was one of the state's most celebrated resort destinations. Benjamin Harvey encountered it in seventeen eighty-one, and his name stuck. By the early nineteen hundreds, visitors arrived by train and trolley to swim, sail, and promenade along its shores.
The grandest hotel here was the Oneonta, built in eighteen ninety-eight and destroyed by fire in nineteen nineteen. An amusement park operated from eighteen ninety-one all the way to nineteen eighty-four. Steamboats of the Lake Transit Company carried many thousands of passengers to different points around the lake between eighteen ninety-three and nineteen thirty-two, making this quiet corner of Wyoming County a lively summer playground for generations of Pennsylvanians.
