Bloomsburg, PA

Bloomsburg holds a Pennsylvania distinction of pure legal poetry: it is the only incorporated "Town" in the entire Commonwealth — every other municipality is a city, borough or township, but Bloomsburg alone, since 1870, is officially a Town. It sits handsomely on a terrace above the Susquehanna's North Branch, in Columbia County, whose covered wooden bridges — more than twenty of them, including a rare twin pair — still carry back roads over the creeks as they have since the nineteenth century.

The Town's great annual rite is the Bloomsburg Fair. Held since 1855, it is one of the oldest and largest agricultural fairs in Pennsylvania: for one week each autumn the fairgrounds become a temporary city of livestock barns, harness racing, grandstand concerts and funnel-cake smoke, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors to a town of fifteen thousand. The other engine is Bloomsburg University, grown from an 1839 academy, whose campus on the hill sustains theatre, choirs and concert life through the year — including the Celebrity Artist Series that has long brought touring performers to the Susquehanna Valley. No single landmark hall is recorded in the archive here; Bloomsburg's culture, like the Town itself, is a matter of community rather than monument, renewed every year when the Fair gates open.