Two weeks ago, I published a column on an extremely memorable (for me) trip across our state on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It ended at the appropriately named Midway rest stop. This week we will pick up the trip at that point and head on east.
Back on the road we negotiate the lovely gap in Tussey Mountain cut by the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River and then cross the valley between Tussey and Wray’s Hill. We go through the Clear Ridge Cut, so deep that it has a pair of benches on each side to intercept falling rock. Passing Breezewood brings back a host of memories. This is where my parents would leave the Turnpike and pick up Route 30 on trips to my father’s home. This is where a bus filled with newly inducted draftees left the Turnpike and headed south for Camp Meade on a dreadful September night in 1953. This is where my wife and I with three children and a dog in a Suburban pulling a camping trailer headed south for vacation on the Outer Banks on many pleasurable occasions.
East of Breezewood the original Turnpike went through a series of five tunnels through narrow parallel ridges running northeast to southwest. The first two, Wray’s Hill and Sideling Hill, were bypassed in 1970 by a route paralleling Route 30. The other three – Tuscarora, Kittatinny, and Blue Mountain – had parallel tunnels drilled beside the original ones. The valley between Kittatinny and Blue Mountain is about two hundred yards wide, occupied only by a tiny stream full of brook trout, a favorite of my Uncle Emory.
The vista when eastbound motorists exit Blue Mountain Tunnel features a dramatically different environment. Stretching fifteen miles to the southeast to South Mountain is a rich agricultural valley, a stark contrast to the mountains to the west. This is the “Great Valley” which runs 250 miles from the Susquehanna River to the Smoky Mountains. South of the Potomac River it is known as the Shenandoah Valley. Four generations of my ancestors – Oylers, Smiths, Geesamans, Dulls, Kochs, Smalls, Sweigerts, and Smetzers – have lived in the Valley since pre-Revolutionary War times — another massive memory overload for me. The Turnpike heads east toward the Susquehanna River on a route that includes a stretch twelve miles long, “straight as a string”. The interchange north of Carlisle marks the original eastern terminus of the Turnpike, 160 miles from Irwin.
At this point we are close to Conodoguinet Creek. The Anglicized version of its Indian name is “A Long Way With Many Bends” and indeed in the ten miles from Carlisle to the Susquehanna River the creek has a dozen meandering loops. The Susquehanna is another distinct boundary between environments and cultures. Physically it was a big enough barrier that burning the bridge across it between Columbia and Wrightsville protected Lancaster County from the rebels when Robert E. Lee came north before Gettysburg. The Turnpike crosses it about five miles south of Harrisburg and deposits us in another world, a world increasingly populated by real Pennsylvania Dutchmen – Amish, Dunkers, and Mennonites. These are “Old Order” Anabaptists, not moderate Lutherans like most of the German settlers on the west side of the Susquehanna. Here we are five miles south of Route 22 (the William Penn Highway) and fifteen miles north of Route 30 (the Lincoln Highway), the two major east-west arteries that predate the Turnpike.
Ten miles into “Dutch Country” and we are skirting the southern edge of the ridge which is the northeastward extension of South Mountain; we are officially out of the Great Valley. On the other side of the ridge is Cornwall, location of a state museum preserving the eighteenth-century charcoal fired iron furnace that provided munitions to the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Thirty miles farther east we will pass close to another similar site, the Hopewell Iron Furnace, a national historic site administered by the National Park Service. Halfway between the two is Ephrata, site of Ephrata Cloister, the historic convent/monastery of the Seventh Day Dunkers. Currently administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, it was founded in 1732 and survived into the twentieth century. In this part of the state, every village is an historic site.
This portion of the Turnpike is new to me, primarily because our family had no connections in the eastern part of the state. The extension from Carlisle to King of Prussia, one hundred miles long, was completed early in the 1950s for eighty-seven million dollars. In 2026 dollars that is about twelve million dollars a mile. In contrast, the recent construction of Interstate 576 between Cecil and 22/30 in Findlay Township cost slightly over thirty million dollars a mile. A case study explaining this discrepancy would be interesting.
Although we occasionally see prosperous farms, our route is largely through lightly forested areas. A major advantage of travelling as a passenger is the opportunity it provides me to search the Internet on my I-phone and investigate things I am seeing. An inspection of the satellite view of our itinerary confirms that we are just skirting the northern edge of the bounteous agricultural portion of Lancaster County which extends fifty miles south to the Maryland border. Nonetheless, we see enough examples of comfortable farmhouses surrounded by massive barns to get a flavor of that environment. Soon we begin to pass by towns in the Philadelphia sphere – Coatesville, Downington, West Chester, Paoli, and finally King of Prussia, where we exit the Turnpike and head for our hotel in Audubon.
By now my cup hath runneth over several times with the myriad of new and old wonders that I have experienced on this odyssey across my beloved Pennsylvania on my beloved Turnpike. Pennsylvania is a cultural museum, an historical museum, an industrial museum, and a geological museum all rolled into one, and the Turnpike is a season’s ticket to all of them.