Sugar Notch, PA

Sugar Notch is a Luzerne County borough named for the sugar maples that once surrounded it, incorporated from Hanover Township on April 3, 1867. Coal shaped the borough soon after: the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad ran near town, and mining work tied local households to the Wyoming Valley's furnaces, breakers, and rail lines. The name sounds pastoral, but the town's older story is a hard-working anthracite one. The maples gave the borough its name, while the seams below gave generations of families their work.

Today Sugar Notch sits in the Hanover Area School District and shares the larger valley's network of schools, roads, and former mine lands. The Hanover Recreation Area, developed through a partnership involving the borough, Hanover Township, Warrior Run, and the school district, has turned reclaimed ground into a place for trails and outdoor use. Sugar Notch feels like one of those Wyoming Valley boroughs where the trees in the name and the coal under the ground both still matter.