Reveal of the Winter 2026 "Spot the Gretna Cousin" Challenge

by Stacy Schroeder

This game is starting to catch on! Your guesses came in fast and furious over the last few weeks.

This season's edition is all about the gorgeous, hand-tinted postcards that were popular in the early 1900s. Something so soothing about these colors, don't you think?

Thanks to the Mount Gretna Area Historical Society for providing scans of (most of) the postcards featured in our Winter 2026 issue. One, of course, came from somewhere else.

Spoiler alert: Prefer to guess first? Hop over to our Magazine page and check out Page 11 of our Winter 2026 issue before reading further.

The correct answer to our Winter 2026 round of this game — the postcard image that is not from Mount Gretna — is postcard #9. Reader Pat Allwein was the first (non-family member) to guess correctly. Kudos, Pat! A number of others came in with the same assessment. This is a town that knows its postcards! Other guesses included #2, #7, and #8.

So what's the story behind #9? So glad you asked.

This image is from Camp Nawakwa, a Lutheran church camp in Arendtsville, PA. The white cabins are part of its Lower Camp cabin row and are still in existence today.

Technically, this postcard is a part of Gretna, since a framed copy of it hangs in Creative Director Stacy Schroeder's cottage.

But the connections go much deeper.

Gretna and Nawakwa share ancestral ties. Both owe at least part of their existence to an 1874 Sunday School teacher's assembly held along the shores of New York's Lake Chautauqua. This event underscored a growing national interest in developing and equipping well-rounded lay leaders to share their faith.

Two years later, the Chautauqua Institute was founded from that gathering, and Gretna's Chautauqua community later followed in 1892.

The establishment of camps around these same principles of religious, social, recreational, and intellectual learning took a little longer. Nawakwa, one of the first, welcomed its initial campers in 1929.

Forty years later, yet another bridge between Gretna and Nawakwa was built. Camp Kirchenwald (a sister camp to Nawakwa) was created on 340 acres of land in nearby Colebrook (just west of Gretna).

We hope you enjoyed the meander these postcards inspired. Thanks to all who participated in this game and congratulations, once again, to Pat Allwein for being the first to Spot the Gretna Cousin.

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We’d love your ideas for future Spot the Gretna Cousin challenges. Send suggestions to Stacy@MountGretnaMagazine.org.