The White Rose City
Near York, Pennsylvania
York carries its nickname from an ocean away and from six centuries back. The city is called the White Rose City, a reference to the heraldic badge of the royal House of York in England, the white rose first adopted as a symbol by Edmund of Langley, the first Duke of York, in the late thirteen hundreds. It became famous across Europe as one of the emblems of the Wars of the Roses, the conflict that divided England between the Yorkist and Lancastrian branches of the royal family through the second half of the fourteen hundreds.
Lancaster, Pennsylvania sits about twenty-four miles to the east of York. The two Pennsylvania cities carry the English rivalry in their names and, by tradition, in their nicknames: York the White Rose City, Lancaster the Red Rose City, a geographic echo of the English war whose decisive battle came at Bosworth Field in fourteen eighty-five. The Penn family named York County in seventeen forty-nine, either to honor James, Duke of York, or the English city of York, who became King James the Second and was a patron of the Penn family's Pennsylvania enterprise.
The white rose appears on the city seal. It is the kind of history that a city wears without always noticing. Residents drive past white rose planters along the highway approaches to town and may or may not know that the symbol descends from a medieval English dynastic conflict.
But the Wars of the Roses ended more than five centuries ago, and York, Pennsylvania, is still here, still wearing the flower.
