Echoes of the Forest

by Michael Long

[Originally published in the Summer 2026 issue of Mount Gretna Magazine. View the complete issue to experience this story in its original design, along with additional photographs and content.]

Photo by Shannon Fretz Photography

A tempest of post-World War I optimism shook the trees of Mount Gretna in 1926, as the roar of the 1920s approached full bellow. A roller coaster rumbled, a carousel whirled, and worsted wool-clad bathers splashed about in the “million-gallon” pool that summer at entrepreneur Abraham Lincoln Kauffman’s newly opened amusement park, just east of the campmeeting in what is now Gretna Heights.

Automobiles, no longer an exclusive novelty for the wealthy, enjoyed free parking at the park after making their way to Gretna via the concrete highway that Kauffman’s son-in-law, Andy Daigneau, helped to lay just two years earlier. The same railroads that first reached into the woodlands in the late 19th century were fueling 20th-century industrialization and economic exuberance that rapidly converted millions of Americans into credit-accruing consumers, all hungry for a bit of leisure.

Tennis at the Conewago Hotel and then perhaps a refreshing dip in the lake, anyone?

In addition to managing a hotel owned by his father-in-law Kauffman, Daigneau ran a local garage to service the many Model T Fords coming up the highway. In 1926, he became a hoseman in Mount Gretna’s first official fire company. Formal infrastructure, like a fire company, grew around the crush of people who were descending on Gretna each summer. In 1926, the United Brethren campmeeting reported average daily attendance of 1,200, and Sunday services could exceed 10,000 souls.

Add in the several thousand Pennsylvania National Guard troops who cycled through the Camp Edmund Lynch training grounds that summer, and the need for a permanent public-service framework — water, sewer, electricity, phones, fire, and police protection — was rapidly transforming the summer playground into a year-round, four-seasons habitable sylvan outpost.

Some of the Pennsylvania Chautauqua regulars who longed to make Gretna a more permanent address petitioned the Lebanon County Court of Common Pleas in August 1925 for municipal status. On Oct. 7, 1926, the court’s president judge, Charles V. Henry, granted the petitioners’ right to incorporate Mount Gretna into a borough along the lines of land owned by the Pennsylvania Chautauqua Association in South Londonderry and West Cornwall townships. 

By the time the November election rolled around, some 60 voters had registered Mount Gretna as their primary polling place. The borough’s first elected mayor, referred to then as a burgess, was John Geiger Ingram, a Bethlehem Steel mining engineer who lived in Colebrook but “cottaged” with his family in Gretna, as the local newspapers described it.

Looking at Gretna today

A century later, the borough, at least on the surface, looks much the same as it did when Calvin Coolidge was president. The number of homes has increased, but only at about one cottage every 14 months. The number of dwellings continues to exceed the number of permanent residents. When the borough first incorporated, it claimed 113 residents and 135 dwellings; today, it has approximately 190 permanent residents and 217 dwellings.

The Pennsylvania Chautauqua, the not-for-profit that owns most of the public spaces and has been charged with preserving the culture and programming that is the town’s lifeblood, continues to work hand in glove with borough officials to maintain historic and natural spaces. The borough, with its six full-time employees, patches potholes, fixes curbs, and, during the winter months, clears roads of snow.

Some of the most important and least visible changes that have shaped the borough across the century have happened underground. For nearly a half-century, Borough Director of Public Works Bill Care has helped guide the invisible work that keeps the borough healthy and welcoming for visitors.

At 76, Bill is older than the pipes running beneath borough streets — pipes he had a hand laying as a member of the borough’s water and sewer authority. The borough hired him fresh off earning his plumber’s license in 1977, just a few years after the municipal authority took control of the borough’s underground network. Back then, its substructures were rapidly deteriorating.

“If I would have realized at the time how bad things were from an infrastructure standpoint,” Bill recalls with a laugh, “I probably wouldn’t have taken the job.”

Despite the crumbling infrastructure, Bill says he came into borough operations at a time when forward-thinking people were invested in revitalization.

This year, the municipal authority finished replacing every water main in its system. This project began in the 1980s, and through upgrades and replacements, the authority has been able to sustain a sewage plant that dates to 1940. While they might not be the showiest strands in the colorful fabric of the Gretna community, Bill and his crew are the essential threads that hold its hem in place.

The borough’s more ethereal, artistic underpinnings, marked by a Chautauquan philosophy that celebrates personal growth and expression in a restorative natural environment, have only grown stronger across the century. Generations of dedicated patrons managed to squeeze two centuries’ worth of visual, musical, and performing arts into the last 100 years. Gretna Theatre has tallied 99 years of continuous performances, with the likes of Oscar-winning talent Charlton Heston and Broadway icon Bernadette Peters gracing the Gretna Playhouse stage.

Gretna Music’s 51 years have featured top-tier jazz and classical musicians, including legendary jazzmen Dave Brubeck, Sonny Rollins, and Wynton Marsalis, as well as violinist Hilary Hahn and pianist Emanuel Ax. The borough’s marquee annual event, the Mount Gretna Outdoor Art Show, now in its 52nd year, can still pack them in by the thousands like those Sunday services of yore.

Fostering a ‘sense of place’ in Gretna

Art show director and recently elected borough mayor Kerry Royer has lived in the borough for nearly a quarter-century. She has climbed the hill many times, walked the terraced streets, talked with neighbors, and watched as slack-jawed out-of-towners who sought out Gretna for its arts community fall under the spell of its charm and natural beauty. She figures what drew people to Mount Gretna in 1926 is the same thing that draws people here today: The simple magic of a community tucked into the side of a mountain surrounded by forest and water.

“It’s a nostalgic connection to nature and history and civic values,” Kerry says. “That sense of place is precious to people, and it’s something they find when they come here and then they want to continue it. Because when you’re here, you feel like a caretaker of these cottages and this natural land. You want to preserve it for people to experience because it is so rare.”

Deb Simpson is among the people whom Gretna mesmerized, and now she’s working to preserve the enchanting borough for posterity. A State College resident for 38 years, Simpson discovered Mount Gretna leafing through a travel magazine while waiting for a dental appointment. She figures the pictures of trees made her stop and read the article about what seemed to her a utopian village.

Weeklong stays through the 2010s led her to build a house on Lebanon Avenue in 2020. Now retired from her job as a systems analyst at Penn State University, she serves as president of the borough council. Whether the borough makes it another hundred years, she says, likely will depend on its ability to protect and stay connected with Gretna’s sacred canopy.

“I think we will be here as long as the trees are here,” she proclaims.

Michael Long is the deputy editor of the Investigations and Enterprise team for LNP | LancasterOnline and WITF. He and his family hail from northern Lancaster County and still frequent Mount Gretna.