Mont Alto, PA

Mont Alto is a Franklin County borough on the West Branch of Little Antietam Creek, between Chambersburg and Waynesboro. Its older map was built around iron: Colonel Daniel Hughes and his sons built a charcoal furnace in 1807, and the works drove the need for a railroad to carry metal to market. The Mont Alto Railroad arrived in 1872, giving a small mountain community a direct line out.

When the ironworks closed in 1893, the land took a surprising second turn. A summer resort had already grown along Antietam Creek, and Pennsylvania turned the property into its first state forest park in 1902. The park remains the oldest state park in the system, while Penn State Mont Alto traces its campus history to the forestry academy opened there in 1903. Mont Alto is a borough with an industrial past tucked beside a park-and-campus landscape - furnace slag, creek woods, and college buildings sharing one valley. The borough still lives beside that legacy.