Ask Pennsylvanians to name where in the state they hail from, and you’ll get a range of responses.
Linda McKee, a DuBois resident who grew up in Titusville, divides the commonwealth into six neat regions: northwest, north-central, northeast, southeast, south-central, and southwest. So for her, the answer is straightforward: She’s originally from northwest Pennsylvania, and currently lives in north-central.
She acknowledged that each sector has “its own character,” but likes her system for its utility: “I guess it’s mostly, for me, just being able to locate things quickly on a map,” McKee said.
For Erie resident Karyl Shaffer, specifying her home region helps explain who she is.
“Say, ‘I’m from the Alleghenies,’ and other people all across the state are going to know what that means,” Shaffer told PA Local. “They’re gonna know that that means that I value certain things, that I grew up a certain way.” She’s from Windber, and identifies most closely with the Laurel Highlands.
For many Pennsylvanians, regional identity runs deep. It manifests in all manner of ways, from which sports teams people cheer for to what they eat and where they buy gas. You can even hear it in how some people talk.
These identities also help shape how Pennsylvanians relate to each other, what they call areas of the state, and where they decide to put down roots, PA Local found in over a dozen interviews with residents.
Shaffer has lived across the state, settling in Pottsville for several months, Pittsburgh for two years, and Harrisburg for three years. Living in the state capital in the late 1990s, she “started to really, seriously become aware and think about the regional differences in Pennsylvania,” she said.
In Harrisburg, Shaffer felt like the odd woman out for having a camper and spending weekends in the woods. Her deep connection to nature, formed in Western Pennsylvania, didn’t seem to be the norm out east.
Claire Gawinowicz lives right outside Philadelphia’s city limits, but grew up “upstate,” in Hazleton. She thinks it’s important to draw regional distinctions because there’s no unifying state identity.
“You can’t say, you know, ‘I’m a Pennsylvanian,’ and everyone knows what you are,” she said.
She observed this firsthand decades ago, when she moved to Philly in 1978. City life was very different from her more “isolated,” less urban experience growing up. Meanwhile, she found herself pushing back against “misperceptions” from friends back home who thought she was living in “some kind of a war zone,” telling them that no, she didn’t have to walk around with a gun.
Taking trips to other locales, like the “gorgeous” Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, reinforced for Gawinowicz just how varied this state is: “You feel like you’re in a completely different country, almost.”
Regional differences and ‘layering’ identities
How did different areas of Pennsylvania develop such varied identities in the first place?
It largely begins with the environment, according to Allen Dieterich-Ward, a history professor and the director of Shippensburg University’s graduate school.
“Even with all of our improvements in transportation and telecommunications, the underlying sort of ease by which you can move from place to place, or the sense of a shared natural and built environment, that’s a real underpinning of a regional identity,” he said.
Pennsylvania’s landscape shaped settlement patterns for both Native peoples and European colonists, with the Appalachian Mountains serving as a major barrier separating east from west, Dieterich-Ward explained. Over time, different ethnic groups put down roots in different areas, and distinct regional cultures developed.
Transportation and industrial development also played a role in shaping regions, he added, with canals and railroads linking communities’ economies, and allowing easier movement between them.
Each industry left a specific footprint, said Douglas Miller, site administrator at William Penn’s former estate and a self-described “student of Pennsylvania history.”
He pointed to lumber in north-central Pennsylvania, anthracite coal in NEPA, oil in the Venango County area, and steel in the Pittsburgh region as examples of businesses that have informed local identity.
Regional character has a tendency to “ebb and flow” with history, particularly as industries rise and decline in dominance, Dieterich-Ward said. New identities can also be “layered” on top of old ones.
Steven Schnell, a cultural geography professor at Kutztown University, said he rarely hears his students talk about “Coal Country” when discussing the area of the state known for its anthracite deposits. Instead of that once common parlance, they tend to use “Northeastern PA.”
“It’s still a part of the historic identity there, but it’s not like any of the kids growing up there grew up in the mines, or even probably with parents in the mines at this point,” Schnell said. “That seems to have maybe a little less resonance with people because it’s not central to their experience.”
Having so many different regional identities under one state can have political implications, Dieterich-Ward noted. Pennsylvania is a “pretty good stand-in for the nation as a whole” because of it, he said.
Since no one region’s economic, political, or cultural interests overpowers the others, it can be “much more difficult in Pennsylvania state politics to come to a consensus on things,” he said — though that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
“Underlying all of these different regional identities, as different as they can be, there is a notion … of a really, really strong sense of place,” Dieterich-Ward said. “And if you can mobilize and find sort of the Venn diagram of where those regional passions overlap with one another, you can come up with really good public policies, and we have done that in the past.”
What’s in a name?
Knowing how strong Pennsylvania’s various identities are, defining regions should be easy, right?
Not quite. There are tons of ways to slice up the state, and no single approach is definitive.
Divide the state by its landforms, and you’ll end up with oddly-shaped regions, some with names you’re unlikely to ever hear in common conversation. Group regions using the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistical areas, and 13 rural counties are completely left out. Rely on the materials the state provides to tourists, which tout regions like the “Pennsylvania Wilds,” “Dutch Country Roads,” and “Philadelphia and Its Countryside,” and you’ll probably make people in the burbs scratch their heads and wonder why you’re calling their subdivision the “countryside.”
I could go on, or you could just draw your own map. (No, seriously. Draw one and email it to me — I’d love to see it.)
When PA Local went to the people to learn what they say when asked where in Pennsylvania they’re from, some of the hundreds of answers leaned into cultural or economic histories, deferring to names like the Slate Belt or the Capitol Region. Others relied on geography, namechecking the Central Susquehanna Valley or the Poconos. Some people kept things straightforward by naming their hometown, county, or a nearby city.
Directional terms, like northwestern, central, or southeastern, were common, but boundaries lacked consensus — though some people seemed ready to pick a fight to defend their definition.
“People … have very strong ideas about what their region is, what their identity is, and what is a part of it, and what isn’t,” said Schnell, the Kutztown professor. “It’s interesting in part because it’s a purely cultural kind of a definition. It’s not like there’s an objective truth to it.”
Many of the terms people use amount to what geographers call “vernacular regions,” which are “perceptual” areas that exist “in people’s heads,” Schnell explained.
“They sort of evolve over time as shorthand for a particular region, but it’s not necessarily geographical,” he said. “It’s places that people perceive as sharing certain characteristics.” He noted that these perceptions can be shaped by stereotypes or exclude newcomers.
In conversations with PA Local, Pennsylvanians cited several different sources for the terminology they use to describe their home areas, including their families, local TV news, and names of regional organizations. McKee, the DuBois resident, named the North Central Pennsylvania Regional Planning and Development Commission — a nonprofit body that serves her county and five others — as a reference point.
Boundaries used to define regions included mountain ranges, highways, tunnels, and specific towns. You know you’re “upstate” once you’ve passed through the Lehigh Tunnel heading north on the Turnpike, said Gawinowicz, the Hazleton native.
In explaining their reasoning, people talked about places’ geography, positions on a statewide map, culture, and general “character.”
But summing up that regional je ne sais quoi in just a few words is easier said than done. Chester County resident Graham Dellinger, who’s traveled all over the state, said he recognizes the value in finding regional terms that “convey as much meaning as possible in the simplest way that is easily received and understood.”
But he tends to waffle when it comes to Lebanon County, where he grew up. He’s heard terms like “Amish Country,” “Pennsyltucky,” and “Central PA” thrown around, but none seems quite right to him. So when people ask him where he grew up, he usually just says “the Lancaster/Lebanon area,” or “near Hershey.”
“It’s tough to be perfect,” Dellinger said. “It’s a complicated thing.”
Complications and all, the “diversity” of the state’s many regions (however they may be named and bounded) can be something to celebrate, said Miller, the historic site administrator.
“I always like to think of it as a plaid,” he said of the state’s cultural makeup. “There’s warp and weave to it, and together it makes something really beautiful, but each of these have an individual thread.”
This is the second installment in a series about Pennsylvania’s regions. Find the first piece — a survey asking readers to define regional boundaries — here. To make sure you don’t miss future installments, subscribe to our PA Local newsletter.