Blue Ridge Summit, PA

Blue Ridge Summit sits on South Mountain at the height of land in Franklin County, less than three miles east of Pen Mar and close to the Maryland line. Its 2020 population was 887, and residents share a landscape shaped by the ridge, Pennsylvania Route 16, and the old resort routes over the mountain. The railroad arrived in 1872, bringing Baltimore visitors to a summer community of boarding houses and cottages before air-conditioning and later travel patterns changed the business.

The local stories are unusually concentrated. Wallis Simpson was born in a cottage beside the Monterey Inn in 1896, and the Monterey Country Club still occupies the historic resort ground. Its golf course dates to before 1885; the club was organized in 1903, and Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Dwight D. Eisenhower all played there. The same mountain passes saw cavalry action during the Gettysburg campaign, so a short drive through Blue Ridge Summit can move from resort history to Civil War geography in a few minutes.