Mount Gretna: The Resort a Railroad Man Built

In eighteen eighty-three, ironmaster and railroad executive Robert Coleman was looking for ways to fill seats on his Cornwall and Lebanon Railroad. He found a grove of enormous pines and hardwoods in the Lebanon County hills and bought it. The name Gretna reportedly came from a railroad official's wife, Mount was added to it, and Coleman set about building a summer destination.

Within a decade, Mount Gretna had a carousel, a large auditorium, a narrow-gauge rail line circling the lake, and a Chautauqua assembly that drew crowds from across Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Chautauqua held its first gathering here in the early eighteen nineties, modeled on the original institution in New York, offering lectures, concerts, and educational programs in the open air.

The resort Coleman built to sell train tickets outlasted the railroad entirely. Mount Gretna is still an active community today, one of the few Chautauqua sites remaining in North America, its open-air theater still running summer performances in the same pine-shaded hollow.