Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania — No Ocean Required

There is no ocean within two hundred miles of Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, and the name has puzzled travelers since the borough incorporated in eighteen twenty-six. The explanation involves a rivalry between two settlements on opposite banks of the West Branch Susquehanna River. In the seventeen eighties, brothers Reuben and Jeremiah Manning, who had relocated from New Jersey, laid out a town on the western bank.

Neighbors on the eastern shore, watching the Manning settlement grow, began calling it the Jersey Shore, a pointed reference to the family's origins. The nickname stuck. The Manning settlement was originally called Waynesburg, but the common name had taken hold, and when incorporation came in eighteen twenty-six, Jersey Shore it officially became.

The borough sits in the valley below Bald Eagle Mountain and still carries the most geographically misleading name in central Pennsylvania.