Pennsylvania Dutch Country: Steam Trains, Plain Communities & Colonial Communes

America's oldest continuously operating short-line railroad, chartered in 1832, the Strasburg Railroad runs a 9-mile round trip steam-hauled excursion through working Amish farmland that looks essentially unchanged since the line's founding. Wooden coaches from the 1920s creak pleasantly as the locomotive — a genuine operating steam engine — pulls the train past cornfields, one-room schoolhouses, and horse-drawn farm equipment working the fields alongside the tracks. The experience is unhurried and genuinely evocative of a pre-diesel world, and the Amish farms visible from the windows are not staged for tourism.

Directly across the road from the Strasburg Railroad depot, the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania houses 45 historic locomotives spanning 1858 to 1994 — among them the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 electric #4935 and the steam locomotive #460 that pulled Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral train in 1945. The collection includes the only surviving Camelback locomotives, a cab design unique to the Pennsylvania Railroad in which the engineer sat astride the boiler while the fireman worked behind. The scale of the equipment, viewed at ground level and from a mezzanine walkway, conveys the industrial ambition of the Pennsylvania Railroad in a way photographs cannot.

Route 340 — Old Philadelphia Pike — runs through Bird-in-Hand and Intercourse in a corridor of Amish farmland that functions as a working agricultural landscape rather than a museum exhibit. Horse-drawn buggies share the road with cars in a daily rhythm unchanged for generations; roadside farm stands sell produce by the honor system, with a tin box for payment and no vendor present. The place names along this stretch (Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse, Paradise, Blue Ball) are genuine colonial-era settlements whose names have amused outsiders for three hundred years. Driving slowly along 340 in either direction from Bird-in-Hand costs nothing and communicates the density and vitality of Lancaster County Amish life more plainly than any guided tour.

A 40-shop artisan village in the village of Intercourse — which is itself a working Amish and Mennonite community — Kitchen Kettle Village includes Lapp Valley Farm's fresh-made ice cream (made from their own dairy herd's milk), a jam kitchen where you can watch preserves being made in open copper kettles, a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign shop, and a range of craft and food vendors. It sits alongside genuine working farms and buggy traffic, making the commercial layer feel reasonably integrated with the surrounding community rather than entirely extracted from it.

Built in 1719, the Hans Herr House is the oldest surviving building in Lancaster County and the oldest structure in Pennsylvania constructed by German-speaking immigrants. Hans Herr was a Mennonite bishop who led one of the first organized Mennonite migrations to Pennsylvania under William Penn's 1681 charter of religious tolerance. The medieval Germanic architecture — steeply pitched roof, thick stone walls, tiny windows — reflects the building traditions the settlers carried directly from the Palatinate region of Germany. The property includes a working colonial farm with period tools and interpreters demonstrating 18th-century agricultural techniques.

Founded in 1732 by Johann Conrad Beissel — a German mystic and pietist who emigrated from the Palatinate — the Ephrata Cloister was the first communal religious settlement in America, predating the Declaration of Independence by more than four decades. Celibate Brothers and Sisters lived in separate medieval-style stone and timber buildings, observed a Saturday Sabbath, practiced sleep deprivation as a spiritual discipline (sleeping on narrow wooden benches for only a few hours a night), and operated a printing press that produced some of the finest colonial-era publications in Pennsylvania. The community created illuminated manuscripts called Frakturschriften — elaborate calligraphic texts in a style unique to Lancaster County German culture. Three of the original 28 buildings survive and are maintained by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission; guided tours convey the genuine strangeness and spiritual seriousness of Beissel's experiment.

A 100-acre outdoor museum comprising 15 historic Pennsylvania German farm buildings — some transplanted from nearby sites, others built on-site to historical specification — Landis Valley depicts rural life in Lancaster County from 1740 to 1940. The collection is anchored by a working heirloom seed program that preserves varieties of vegetables, herbs, and flowers documented in Pennsylvania German communities going back to the 18th century. Costumed interpreters demonstrate weaving on period looms, blacksmithing at a working forge, and open-hearth cooking in a colonial-era kitchen. The result is an unusually honest and scholarly presentation of the agricultural and domestic life that built Lancaster County.

The Federal-style mansion built in 1828 and purchased by James Buchanan in 1848, Wheatland is the only presidential home in Pennsylvania and the residence of America's only bachelor president — the 15th, who served from 1857 to 1861 and is routinely ranked among historians as one of the least effective presidents for his handling of the secession crisis. The house is preserved largely as it appeared during Buchanan's tenure, with original furnishings and personal effects. The guided tour provides a useful and candid accounting of Buchanan's career, his relationship with his niece Harriet Lane (who served as White House hostess), and the political failures that preceded the Civil War.