York Springs: Adams County's First Resort

The small Adams County borough of York Springs owes its existence to the mineral springs that once made it the first summer resort in the county. Visitors from Philadelphia and Baltimore arrived by stagecoach in the eighteen hundreds to drink and bathe in the sulphur-rich waters, which local promoters credited with restorative properties. The community began as part of Latimore Township, developed around eighteen hundred, and was platted as Petersburg before it became a borough in eighteen sixty-eight as York Sulphur Springs, a name later shortened to York Springs. The resort era faded as railroad travel made more distant destinations accessible, and York Springs settled into its role as a small agricultural community in the Adams County countryside , just a few miles north of Gettysburg, in a part of Pennsylvania where the land has a long memory.