Jonestown, Pennsylvania

Jonestown, tucked into the Lebanon Valley of Pennsylvania, was laid out in seventeen sixty-one by a settler named William Jones, who bought three hundred acres from Charles Stout.

Jones named his new settlement Williamstown, after himself, which was a common enough impulse. The problem was that virtually every colony had a Williamstown or Williamsburg already. When Jones died in seventeen seventy-one, his neighbors wasted little time: they renamed the town Jonestown. His own name survived, but only because he was gone.

Jonestown was incorporated as a borough on August twentieth, eighteen seventy from surrounding Swatara Township. It sits along what became an important transportation corridor through central Pennsylvania, and its story is a quiet reminder that many American place names came not from grandeur but from someone who simply got there first and had the deed to prove it.