Winter Wonderland: Written in Honesdale

The song you have hummed in every December of your life was written a few blocks from here. Richard Smith, known as Dick, was born into a family that lived on Church Street in Honesdale. In nineteen thirty-four, while being treated for tuberculosis at a sanitarium in Scranton, he found himself longing for the winters of his childhood, the snow and the open park across from his family home.

That longing became Winter Wonderland, one of the most recorded holiday songs in American history, covered by Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett, and dozens more. Smith never fully recovered. He died in nineteen thirty-five, just months after the song's release, at only thirty-three years old, never knowing the immortality his nostalgia had earned.