Wanamaker is small community in Lehigh County,

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

. It is part of the

Lehigh Valley The Lehigh Valley (), known colloquially as The Valley, is a geographic region formed by the Lehigh River in Lehigh County and Northampton County in eastern Pennsylvania. It is a component valley of the Great Appalachian Valley bound to the no ...

metropolitan area, which had a population of 861,899 and was the 68th most populous

metropolitan area A metropolitan area or metro is a region that consists of a densely populated urban agglomeration and its surrounding territories sharing industries, commercial areas, transport network, infrastructures and housing. A metro area usually com ...

in the U.S. as of the 2020 census. Philip Wanamaker settled at the location about 1791. His son, Christian, later operated a grist mill. The railway station of the Berks County Railroad, later the Schuylkill and Lehigh Branch of the

Reading Company The Reading Company ( ) was a Philadelphia-headquartered railroad that provided passenger and commercial rail transport in eastern Pennsylvania and neighboring states that operated from 1924 until its 1976 acquisition by Conrail. Commonly called ...

, was opened in 1874. Regular passenger service ceased in 1949. Today, the Wanamaker station is the end station for the

Wanamaker, Kempton and Southern Railroad The Wanamaker, Kempton & Southern, Inc. (WK&S) is a privately owned heritage railroad company in Kempton, Pennsylvania. The company was founded in 1963 and operates over an isolated remnant of a former Reading Company line. Its nickname is the H ...

, a local scenic railroad.

References

{{Lehigh Valley Populated places in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania