Middletown, Pennsylvania
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Middletown on the Susquehanna is one of Pennsylvania's oldest inland boroughs, settled in seventeen fifty-five and incorporated as a borough in eighteen twenty-eight. It served as a hub on the Pennsylvania Canal and later on the Pennsylvania Railroad, sitting roughly halfway between Lancaster and Carlisle. The borough is flanked by two sites that define modern American history.
Close by are Penn State Harrisburg and Three Mile Island, where on March twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-nine, a partial meltdown at Unit Two became the most serious accident in United States commercial nuclear power history. The cooling towers across the river have been visible from Middletown ever since, a permanent reminder that a community once famous for being in the middle of things found itself at the center of a national conversation about nuclear risk.
