Walk the Footsteps of America's Past
Dams, reservoirs, and quarries swallowed whole communities across Pennsylvania, and most travelers paddle right over them without a clue. Here's where to go to stand — or float — directly above the lost villages of the Susquehanna watershed and beyond.
Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Lititz form America's newest UNESCO World Heritage site, and they're an easy weekend from Philadelphia or New York. Here's how to spend 48 hours among 1740s stone buildings, a bakery older than the nation, and the longest-running music festival in the country.
The Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor stitches together 165 miles of canal towpath, company towns, and coal-country history into one of the best multi-day rides on the East Coast. Here's how to break it into four days your legs and your curiosity will both thank you for.
Colonial taverns weren't just places to eat — they were post offices, courthouses, and rumor mills where the Revolution got organized over tankards of ale. A handful of Pennsylvania's originals are still pouring, and you can still get a plate at every one of them.
Follow the most famous boundary in American history, one limestone marker at a time. This two-day itinerary traces the Mason-Dixon Line through farm country, border towns, and the surveying story most people never learned in school.
The best seat for Pennsylvania's fall foliage isn't on the highway — it's in a vintage railcar. Here's why the state's heritage railroads outshine every overcrowded overlook, plus how to build a weekend around them.
Pennsylvania has more blue-and-gold historical markers than any state in the union, and some of them are flat-out weird. We built a two-day scavenger-hunt route past seven of the strangest, from a marker about a flying... thing to the ones that got it wrong — or left somebody out entirely.
You can tour Independence Hall in forty minutes or you can spend a whole weekend inside Philadelphia's history — including the night. These five historic hotels and inns put you within a stone's throw of the founding era, and we rate whether the history justifies the bill.
The colonial story gets the textbooks, but the Gilded Age built the country — and Pennsylvania was its engine room. This four-day itinerary follows anthracite, canals, and steel through Scranton, Eckley, and the Alleghenies before more of it disappears.
Want your history with a pillow and a hot breakfast? These seven Pennsylvania inns and taverns hosted Washington, quartered soldiers, or watched the Continental Army march past — and every one of them has a bed you can sleep in tonight.
Forget the textbook version of the Underground Railroad — Pennsylvania lets you stand inside the story. This three-day driving route links Philadelphia's free Black churches with farmhouse hideaways in Chester and Bucks counties, where freedom seekers found refuge on their way north.
Gettysburg gets the crowds, but the Revolution is where America was actually argued into existence — and Pennsylvania holds the proof. Seven under-visited sites, each perfect for a day trip, from winter encampments to the bloodiest hour of the war's Philadelphia campaign.