Lancaster County is blessed with a long and fascinating history that spans from humble farmers seeking religious freedom at the turn of the 18th century to include important roles in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, great political and social figures of the 18th and 19th centuries and many major businesses of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Lancaster County was carved from neighboring Chester County in 1729. Its original boundaries spread over a large area of central Pennsylvania to include present-day York and Cumberland Counties as well as parts of Berks, Lebanon and Northumberland Counties. The City of Lancaster Ð which took its name and its symbol, the red rose, from Lancashire, England Ð is the oldest inland city in America. It was mapped out as a town in 1730, chartered as a borough in 1742 and incorporated as a city in 1818. Other early settlements in Lancaster County grew into the communities of Adamstown, Columbia, Lititz, New Holland and Strasburg. All of these communities were incorporated before 1900.
The area that became Lancaster County was originally populated by Native Americans from the Susquehannock, Conestoga, Shawnee and Delaware tribes. The first permanent settlers were Mennonites who came to occupy nearly 10,000 acres in and around present-day Willow Street by 1710. Amish, German and English settlers soon followed. Some of Lancaster County's noteworthy residents have included James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States; Milton Hershey, the famous chocolate magnate; General Edward Hand, who served with George Washington in the Continental Army; and Thaddeus Stevens, a prominent 19th century congressman and abolitionist who authored the 14th amendment, which gave former slaves citizenship and the right to vote.
Pennsylvania's founder, William Penn, left a legacy of religious tolerance and Lancaster County soon became a haven for those seeking religious freedom. Mennonites from Germany and Switzerland came here in the early 18th century seeking to practice their industrious faith in peace. In the mid-18th century, Lancaster's first Jewish community was established; today, it is the fourth-oldest Jewish community in the United States. Lancaster City's oldest congregation, Trinity Lutheran Church, was formed in 1730 and other prominent city churches, active to this day, were established just a few years later. Lancaster County currently is home to hundreds of churches of all denominations, three synagogues and an Islamic center.
Lancaster City was capital of the United States for one day when the Continental Congress escaped British soldiers in Philadelphia and convened in Lancaster on September 27, 1777 before heading to across the Susquehanna River to safety. During the Revolutionary War, Lancaster City was home to military stables and barracks where British and Hessian soldiers were imprisoned. And the infamous "widow-maker" that helped the colonists win the war, the long-muzzled Pennsylvania Rifle (later called the Kentucky Rifle), was manufactured in southern Lancaster County. Lancaster County also was an important line along the Underground Railroad, where escaped slaves ventured into freedom. Southern Lancaster County served as a popular conduit on the way to refuge in Philadelphia, while Columbia attracted escaped slaves with the rare promise of economic stability for an emerging black middle class. In 1851, a major resistance took place in Lancaster County when a white slave owner from Maryland journeyed to Christiana to retrieve several runaway slaves. The slave owner was killed when violence erupted between him, the slaves and the free black man who provided the slaves asylum. The national significance of the Christiana Resistance, as it came to be called, was its legacy as the first direct reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law, which gave slave owners the power of the federal government to retrieve escaped slaves. Tensions swelled between the North and the South as a result of the Resistance and it was, ultimately, the first blood spilled of the Civil War.
Many internationally-recognized brand names have called Lancaster County home. Hershey's Chocolate was founded Lancaster in 1894 when Milton Hershey started a chocolate-making subsidiary of the Lancaster Caramel Company. F.W. Woolworth established the country's first "5 & 10 cent" store in Lancaster in 1879. And the Hamilton Watch Company manufactured some of the world's most accurate and innovative timepieces Ð including the first battery-operated wrist watch and digital watch Ð in Lancaster for much of the 20th century.