Lancaster County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Lancaster County

Forty-five thousand Amish residents (per Elizabethtown College Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies 2024 census) maintain horse-and-buggy transportation and a largely non-electrified rural agricultural economy across 47 church districts in Lancaster County — the largest non-urban Amish community on Earth. Lancaster County was founded in 1729 (Pennsylvania colony's third county, after Philadelphia and Chester) and is among the oldest continuously inhabited non-Indigenous counties in the United States. Per USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service 2022 Census of Agriculture, Lancaster is the most-productive non-irrigated agricultural county in the United States by total market value of products sold ($1.7 billion), driven by Amish tobacco-and-dairy intensive smallholdings averaging 80 acres each plus the Pennsylvania Dutch cluster of Mennonite poultry-and-produce operations across the Pequea, Conestoga, and Cocalico valleys. The 943-sq-mi county wraps Lancaster city (population 58,039, the county seat and the historic 1777-78 capital of the United States during the Continental Congress's flight from British-occupied Philadelphia), and the rural townships of Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse, Paradise, Strasburg, Lititz, and Ephrata — every one of which is a working farming community rather than a tourist artifact.

Lancaster County zoning ordinance §901 (the Agricultural Preservation provision adopted countywide via the 1980s Lancaster County Comprehensive Plan) restricts subdivision below 50-acre tracts on Class I-III prime agricultural soils — the policy that has preserved the county's farm landscape against the suburban-Philadelphia development pressure. Most Lancaster County municipalities prohibit overnight RV street parking; KOA-class private campgrounds dominate the RV-friendly accommodations, concentrating in the Bird-in-Hand, Strasburg, and Manheim corridors with full hookups accepting rigs to 50 ft. Buggy-traffic awareness is the central rig-driving discipline here: PA Title 75 §3344 requires all motorists to pass horse-drawn vehicles with a 4-ft clearance minimum, and the 25-mph speed limit on most signed Amish-traffic corridors (PA-340, PA-23, PA-741) is enforced. Strasburg Rail Road (operational since 1832, the oldest continuously operating short-line railroad in the western hemisphere per Trains Magazine historical roster) runs steam-powered passenger excursions to Paradise PA.