The Name Intercourse: Three Theories

Welcome to Intercourse, one of the most photographed town signs in America, and the beating heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country. The village was laid out in seventeen fifty-four, and for its first sixty years it went by a plainer name, Cross Keys, borrowed from a local tavern whose sign showed two crossed keys. Then, in eighteen fourteen, the town became Intercourse, and travelers have been puzzling over that choice ever since.

There are three leading theories, and local historians genuinely disagree about which is true. The first points to the roads. In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, the word intercourse simply meant the meeting and mingling of traffic, the exchange of goods and news where highways crossed.

Intercourse sits where the old Kings Highway, today Route Three Forty, meets the Newport Road, today Route Seven Seventy-Two. To an eighteen fourteen ear, calling a crossroads town Intercourse was as ordinary as calling it Junction. The second theory leans on the same word in a warmer sense.

Intercourse once meant fellowship, the social connection and dealings between neighbors. In a farming community where survival depended on people helping people, the name may have celebrated exactly that spirit of cooperation, the way everyone worked together. The third theory is the most colorful.

Local lore says an old racecourse ran along the eastern edge of town. Racers entered the track from that end, and the entrance was nicknamed Entercourse, which over the years supposedly softened into Intercourse. It is a charming story, though the hardest of the three to document.

Whatever the truth, the name has made this village unforgettable, and it keeps good company. Just up the road you will find Bird in Hand, and a few miles east lies Blue Ball, part of a cluster of Lancaster County place names that delight visitors and fill postcard racks. The Amish and Old Order Mennonite farmers who live here take the giggling in stride.

For them, Intercourse is simply home, a crossroads where black and gray buggies still clip past storefronts, and where the deeper meaning of the name, the daily give and take of a close community, is very much alive.