Jim Thorpe’s outfitters check the Lehigh River gauge three times a day in May. The spring melt and the upstream dam releases conspire to either deliver a perfect Class II run or pin a raft against a midstream boulder, and there is no in-between. Mt. Gretna’s Playhouse season opens around the same time, in a building that has been throwing summer plays since 1927 and still doesn’t have a proper green room. Eagles Mere’s August Water Carnival, going since 1908, is the kind of small-town tradition where cottage families spend July building floats out of plywood and Christmas lights for one night on the lake. Nine Pennsylvania towns below, each with a summer reason worth showing up for.

Jim Thorpe

You come off the Lehigh wet and shaking and find that the Victorian downtown is right there waiting, two blocks of brick and mansard roofs steaming in the afternoon sun. The town wraps a river gorge so steep that the 1820s funicular hauling coal up the mountain ran cable-and-pulley because no horse could climb it. Whitewater season runs May into October. Dam-release weekends, when the upstream Francis E. Walter Reservoir lets extra flow downstream, are when the trips get serious. Pocono Biking on Susquehanna Street shuttles riders to Rockport or White Haven for the 25-mile downhill back along the Lehigh Gorge Trail, an old rail bed that still feels like one. The Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway makes a 16-mile round trip from the restored 1888 Central Railroad of New Jersey station, and the Asa Packer Mansion at the top of Packer Hill (built in 1861 for the founder of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and Lehigh University, sealed shut since the family closed it in 1912) opens for guided tours through the warm months. The interior has not been modernized. The Packers’ last Christmas tree is still on the parlor table where they left it.

Mt. Gretna

Three working summer institutions and almost nothing else. That is the entire point. The Playhouse has run a professional summer season since 1927, in a building that goes back to 1892, when the Pennsylvania Chautauqua Society first set up here to lecture and stage plays for self-improving Victorian families. New show every week. Comedies one week, musicals the next. The open-air Tabernacle, all rough wooden pews and a band shell, fills with summer concerts and lectures in that same Chautauqua tradition. The lake and beach is a private swimming association. Memorial Day through Labor Day, members and day-passes only. which is exactly why the water stays clean and the crowd stays sane. The Mt. Gretna Bike Trail follows an old narrow-gauge rail bed through state forest for a couple of slow miles, perfect for a loop after the Playhouse lets out at ten and the night air smells like white pine.

Eagles Mere

Population 120 in winter. A few thousand in summer, and most of them are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who’ve been coming here since their own grandchildren were children. The lake is the entire reason: clear, spring-fed, with a sandy swim area you wade out into until the cold makes you laugh. The Water Carnival, on a Saturday in August every year since 1908 (with maybe two pandemic-year exceptions), is what holds the place together. Cottage families spend July building themed floats out of plywood and Christmas lights, paddle them around the lake at dusk to a sound system rigged on a dock, and a small panel of locals picks winners. The Eagles Mere Inn on Mary Avenue runs travelers through at a pace that lets you nap before dinner. Hunters Lake five miles south is the spillover option when the main lake feels crowded. The main lake almost never does.

Wellsboro

People in this part of the country call Pine Creek Gorge the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania, and the comparison happens to be earned. The gorge runs about 47 miles through Tioga and Lycoming counties, with the most-photographed overlooks at Leonard Harrison State Park on the east rim and Colton Point on the west, both about 10 miles from town. The Pine Creek Rail Trail runs 62 miles along the gorge floor. The busiest section is the 17 miles between Ansonia and Blackwell that drops most of the elevation, and the outfitters in town shuttle riders to the top so you can coast back without earning it. Hills Creek State Park’s lake holds the calmer swimming for the day after. The Wellsboro Diner on Main Street has served the same diner-counter rotation since the late 1930s. pancakes, coffee, and a meatloaf plate that hasn’t needed updating. Penn Wells Hotel a few doors down keeps gas lamps lit along the sidewalk after dark, a holdover from when the town ran a working gaslight system in the 1890s and the engineers apparently liked it enough to keep some lit.

Somerset

The Whiskey Rebellion. That’s Somerset’s claim, and it mostly gets skipped in school textbooks. From 1791 to 1794, southwestern Pennsylvania farmers refused to pay the federal whiskey tax (small distillers were getting taxed harder than big distillers. yes, lobbyist-tax-policy was already a thing). It became the first real test of federal authority under the new Constitution. President Washington personally led 13,000 troops west to put it down. The army marched right through Somerset. Uptown Somerset’s historic district still carries that period in its brick architecture, with the Somerset County Courthouse anchoring the square. Kooser State Park nine miles southwest holds a trout-stocked lake and a CCC-era picnic grove from the 1930s. go in June, when the laurel is in bloom along the shoreline. The Somerset Historical Center on Route 985 traces rural southwestern Pennsylvania life from the 18th century forward. And fifteen minutes east, the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville is the other reason people stop here. The two stops together do a strange thing: they remind you that this corner of the state has been a witness to American history in moments separated by 207 years and a kind of weight that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

Renovo

About 1,200 year-round residents, and a population that swells with people who come for the trails, the river, and the kind of small Pennsylvania town that hasn’t been rediscovered yet. Renovo runs along the West Branch Susquehanna River in Clinton County. Bucktail State Park Natural Area wraps the corridor and gives the area its mountain-canyon feel. narrow road, no shoulder, deer on the road at dusk. Hyner View State Park six miles east is the regional anchor for hang gliding. A wooden launch ramp sits on a cliff overlooking the river roughly 1,300 feet below. Pilots come from across the eastern US when the wind sits right out of the south, and on a good Saturday in July you can stand at the overlook and count a dozen gliders working the ridge thermals. The Flaming Foliage Festival each October pulls the biggest single crowd of the year. But the summer fly-fishing on the West Branch and its tributaries is what brings the quiet repeat traffic. Local guides will take you out, sell you flies you didn’t know you needed, and leave you on a stretch where you won’t see anyone else for hours.

New Hope

New Hope sits on the Delaware River in Bucks County, with Lambertville, New Jersey, on the opposite bank. A small steel bridge connects them, and pedestrians, cyclists, and car traffic all share it. The two towns together work as one weekend split by water. you cross for breakfast, cross back for dinner, and nobody really tracks which side they’re on. Delaware Canal State Park follows about 60 miles of towpath along the old canal that carried 19th-century coal barges down to tidewater. The trail runs the length of downtown New Hope and is a good post-lunch walk when the heat lifts. Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve a couple of miles south covers 134 acres of native plant exhibits, with peak bloom April into June. The Bucks County Playhouse operates in a converted 1790 grist mill on South Main Street and runs a serious summer professional theater season. actor sightings in the cafes are part of the deal, and locals have learned to keep their phones in their pockets. The New Hope and Ivyland Railroad runs summer steam-train excursions from the 1891 station downtown.

Ridgway

The lumber boom built Main Street, and the lumber boom’s leftovers still walk the streets. The lumber kings of the late 1800s built the Victorians along the stretch known locally as Millionaires Row. money made cutting white pine and hemlock out of the surrounding hills, spent on cupolas and turreted porches. The Clarion River south of town runs Class I-II paddling water that suits canoes and kayaks. Outfitters run shuttles to put-ins and pick you up downstream. The bigger story: Elk County holds Pennsylvania’s only wild free-roaming elk herd. The elk were extirpated from the state in 1867 and reintroduced in 1913 with stock shipped in from Yellowstone, which is the kind of conservation story that nobody outside Pennsylvania knows. Today the Elk Country Visitor Center at Benezette, 30 miles west, runs viewing platforms and timing tips for the bugle in September. Bring binoculars if you go at sunrise. You will need them. And if you’ve never heard a bull elk bugle from a half-mile away in the cold pre-dawn. it sounds like a saxophone being played by something the size of a small truck.

Zelienople

Detmar Basse, a Prussian immigrant, founded Zelienople in 1802 and named it for his daughter Zelie. He thought he was building a New World aristocratic colony. Things did not go to plan. Two centuries later the borough is a 30-mile drive north of Pittsburgh with a Main Street that still carries a 19th-century streetscape and the 1914 Strand Theater as its centerpiece. The Strand was rescued by a community nonprofit in the early 2000s and now books touring music acts and films year-round, with outdoor courtyard programming on summer Saturdays. sit outside on a July evening with a paper plate of food and hear a band you actually came to hear. Connoquenessing Creek runs along the south edge of town for fishing access. Brush Creek Park covers 350 acres of trails and picnic grounds. The Zelienople Historical Society preserves the 1805 Buhl House, the boyhood home of Henry Buhl Jr., whose 20th-century philanthropic legacy through the Buhl Foundation still pays the house’s bills.

A Summer Worth Planning

Pick the weekend by what you actually want to do. Whitewater in early May at Jim Thorpe. Opening night at the Mt. Gretna Playhouse. The Water Carnival at Eagles Mere on a Saturday in August (and book the cottage by April. they go fast). The Pine Creek Gorge overlooks at Wellsboro in any month. The September elk bugle at Benezette outside Ridgway. The hang-glider lineup at Hyner View on a clear July afternoon. The summer band on the Strand courtyard at Zelienople. Each of these nine towns gives you one specific reason to drive, and a downtown holding something worth eating, sleeping in, and walking through when the day’s main event is over.

Pittsburgh Pirates rookie Konnor Griffin met his wife, the former Dendy Hogan, when he was 14. The two were high school sweethearts.

Dendy has been a steady “steady” of the young star player throughout his path leading to the majors.

Griffin was just 19 when they got married Jan. 17 in Oxford, Miss., according to the couple’s The Knot webpage.

“My person is there. I look up, and she’s in the stands. It’s a sense of comfort. It’s the reason we got married. We wanted to travel together and do this life together. It’s definitely a blessing for me,” Griffin said in a May 1 interview with TribLive.

Marrying as a teenager may seem like a foreign concept to Gen Z or Gen Alpha, but it does still happen — and the Griffins are proof.

U.S. Census data reveals that in 1960, about 16% of women married under the age of 18, compared with 2% of women marrying under 18 in 2018.

In 2025, fewer than half (47%) of U.S. households were married couples, a dramatic shift from 50 years ago, when 66% were.

Wedding bells ring less often in the U.S. these days as the average age at first marriage increased to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, a sharp uptick from ages 23.5 and 21.1, respectively, in 1975.

TribLive interviewed multiple couples who chose to marry in their teens or early 20s. They chimed in on their marital moments, wisdom and takeaways.

High school wedding planner

Denise Fiorina was still in high school when she began planning a big Italian wedding to her high school sweetheart, Allan Brzezinski, also of Leechburg.

She was 17.

“I was like a kid in a candy store,” she recalled.

The couple married on Aug. 25, 1973, at the First United Methodist Church in Leechburg.

Denise was 18 and Allan was 21 when the couple celebrated with 350 guests at their reception in the former Steelworkers Union Hall along Market Street.

They honeymooned in Niagara Falls, Canada, and Lake Erie.

“And they said it wouldn’t last. We always laughed that I wasn’t old enough to drink at my wedding reception,” Denise Brzezinski recalled. “We started dating in high school when I was 15. We were high school sweethearts.”

Denise scrapped plans to enroll in nursing school and chose marriage, much to the chagrin of her father.

“My dad said I could still go to school. I said no, that I wanted to get married,” she said.

Choosing to raise a family over a formal career was important to Brze­zinski.

“Having my kids was more important to me than a degree. It was from the heart,” Brzezinski said.

The couple has been married for 52 years, but a near tragedy almost left Denise a widow at age 19 when Allan fell on the job at a mill, plummeting 65 feet.

The doctor’s words to Denise at the hospital concerning her husband’s prognosis were grim.

“You may be widowed,” the doctor told Denise.

“It was terrible. All you could see of Allan was his eyes,” she said. “He was in a body cast for 14 months with a shattered foot and broken vertebrae. It was rough. I was his sole caregiver.”

Denise’s advice to folks marrying young is to be realistic.

“Every day won’t be jolly,” she said.

Her enduring marriage is a source of pride, and now that the couple is in their early 70s, they treasure every day together.

“We were best friends first. He always made me laugh. He still does. At 18 today, I would tell them to make sure that they want to be in it for the long haul. It’s not always easy. There’s a lot to think about. You’re just not saying words when you say your vows,” Denise said.

Love bugs turned shutterbugs

Matthew Olsen was 18 and Chrissy Fajtak was 20 on their wedding day in 2008. (Courtesy of Chrissy Olsen)

Matthew Olsen was 18 and Chrissy Fajtak was 20 and had just finished her associate degree in fine arts at the Community College of Beaver County.

After three years of dating, they married on June 6, 2008, in Aliquippa and celebrated with a family dinner afterwards.

Reaction from both sides of the family was supportive but hesitant.

“Extended family told me I was too young, I needed to explore the world, and we were too young to settle down,” Christine said. “We met in high school. Matthew had attended Sewickley Academy and I saw him in the hall one day and thought, ‘Boy who is that?’ ”

Christine’s mother and grandmother both married at 18.

“My parents also met at Ambridge High School, and my mom was excited. She couldn’t wait to have grandchildren,” said Christine, now 38.

For her, moving out of her childhood home to her marital home was a bit of an adjustment.

“I had to run my own house. My mom taught me things, and it was a learning curve for me — being responsible for the homemaking,” Christine said.

The couple has three school-age children and will celebrate their 18th wedding anniversary next month.

They and operate Weddings By Sal and Bella (the couple’s nicknames in high school when passing love notes; heaven forbid someone’s real name be on a note), providing photography for more than 15 years.

“I don’t see many kids getting married in their teens. Most of our couples have graduated from college or are in college. And we encourage our kids to find themselves before they get married. I don’t want them to jump in without getting to know their partner. But being so young, we didn’t know what it was like being on your own but when you find the right person, sometimes you don’t want to wait.”

“Our kids really know our story because we tie it into our wedding business. We found each other young and we’ve been through life together,” Christine Olsen said.

“I just knew I always wanted a wife and a family and everything just kind of fell into place. She was my first serious relationship,” Matthew said.

‘Studmuffin and Babe’

Shawna Morrill was 19 when she married her husband, Bill Johns, 20 years ago. (Courtesy of Shawna Johns)

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Shawna Morrill was 19 when she married Bill Johns at Kittanning Church of Christ on Aug. 19, 2006.

“None of our parents gave us any issues,” Shawna Johns said.

Shawna has Studmuffin in her phone as Bill’s contact and Bill calls her Babe.

The couple is raising two teenage daughters in Leechburg. Shawna has used her teen bride experience as a teachable moment for her daughters.

“I have told them getting married to your father was the best decision for me at the time, but I highly recommend going to college and living on your own for a while and traveling. I’ve never been on my own,” Shawna said.

She chose to marry and decided not to pursue a medical degree in obstetrics/gynecology at Seton Hill University.

“I feel like I missed out on some things, but at the same time I gained so much,” said Shawna, now 39.

The couple began dating in May of Shawna’s senior year. She moved in with him soon after graduating high school, and he proposed seven months later. Bill was 28 when his teen bride, Shawna, said her vows.

“My family just loved my husband and the running joke is they love him more than they love me,” said Shawna, an in-home care nurse specializing in dementia cases.

She shared her advice for young lovers eager to get hitched.

“If they feel they want to get married, they should live with that person for a few years. You don’t know how the relationship was going to be until you live with that person,” Shawna said. “Does that person really have the
same interest as you? Is that person a slob?”

Marital bliss had a few bumps along the way as the couple approaches their 20th wedding anniversary this year.

“Within the first five years, we had to do marital counseling and it was good because it was coming from an outsider’s point of view,” she said. “My other advice is to try the same interests that your partner has. My husband is big into billiards and we still play together after all these years, and he plays softball because of me.”

Young love, big Leaps

Madison Valente and Steven Angel were 18 and 19 when they married in 2018. (Courtesy of Madison Angel)

Madison Valente and Steven Angel both grew up in Fayette County and met at Albert Gallatin High School.

They were like a young love train.

“He was my first and only boyfriend and I was in ninth grade. Once we got together, we knew from the beginning we would get married and build our future together,” Madison said.

Steven enlisted in the Navy after high school and the couple married on Dec. 14, 2018, when Madison was finishing her senior year. Madison was 18 and Steven was 19.

The couple used a self-uniting marriage license, legal in Pennsylvania, and they chose to have both mothers as witnesses.

In Pennsylvania, anyone 18 or older is legal to marry on their own.

Being a married high school student didn’t come without a bit of talk about town.

“Word got around that I got married. People in a small town talk. My senior quote mentioned following my heart,” she said. “I graduated on May 19, and two weeks later, I was on a plane to Guam with one suitcase. We lived on the Naval base.”

The couple lived together for three years in Guam and while there, Madison planned a traditional wedding back home.

“Pretty much every day was a honeymoon there. It’s such a beautiful place,” Madison said of Guam.

Marrying in high school holds no regrets for Madison.

“It was a big leap that I took. It was a bold decision,” she said.

After three years in Guam, the couple remarried in October 2022 with a church wedding ceremony and reception with 400 guests.

The Angels are raising two sons: Valen, 2, and Madden, 1.

“Being a mom, you need all the energy that you can get. My boys don’t stop until they go to bed,” said Madison, who works full-time in the insurance industry.

Pray together, stay together

Oakmont resident Richard Bowman had to ask his parents for permission for a doozy of an event when he was 17.

“My grandparents (Richard and Judy Bowman) got married right out of high school and had to get special permission from his parents since Richard was a minor,” said granddaughter Erin Bowman. “They’ve been married 56 years.”

Janet and Richard Bowman checked in with TribLive from their early anniversary vacation trip at the Grand Canyon to talk about why they married in their teens.

“We wanted to make a life together and were far more mature than other young people our age,” Richard said. “We’re committed Christians and wanted to build a God-centered marriage and family.”

He worked in software development for more than 50 years to support his family.

The couple offered advice on navigating marriage at a young age.

“Don’t sweat the little stuff,” Richard said. “Honor and respect one another and when possible, always defer to the other person. You don’t have to get your way. The family that prays together stays together.”

Surgery surprise

Kathleen and Robert White of Parks Township. (Courtesy of Robert White)

Robert White of Parks Township had the best Valentine’s Day gift ever at the former Citizens General Hospital in New Kensington.

White was 19, preparing to undergo his fifth operation from injuries sustained in a very bad motorcycle wreck, when he met 18-year-old X-ray tech Kathleen Schmiech of Vandergrift.

“She was wearing a uniform and her smile was overwhelming. I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ and it was a shock,” White, now 70, recalled.

Kathleen and Robert married at a justice of the peace in Vandergrift in 1975.

They’ve raised three adult daughters and have seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Robert said he was never expecting to find his life partner that day in the hospital.

“I saw her and for me it was love at first sight,” Robert said.

He credits Kathleen for his happiness and longevity now that he’s 70.

“Every day we celebrate together,” Robert said. “Since 1973, I’ve had 33 operations and she has been my angel keeping me together. I think that’s an important factor.”