Tourist Attraction and Farmland Trust
Quickly Preserve Land Near Railroad
By Ryan Robinson
Lancaster New Era

Lancaster County, PA - Four days before a Ronks farm was sold at public auction, it became the first to be permanently saved from development under a landmark initiative between the Strasburg Rail Road and Lancaster Farmland Trust. Charles and Janet Leaman’s 90-acre crop farm is believed to be the first in Pennsylvania — and perhaps the nation — to be preserved partially by funds from a private business’s daily ticket sales. “The Strasburg Rail Road runs through farmland that looks very much as it has for a century or more,” said railroad president Linn Moedinger. “This is really exciting.”

But it almost didn’t happen. When the trust learned on Sept. 9 that a farm along Route 741 near the railroad was for sale, the trust’s Caroline Novak made a house call the same day. She convinced the Leamans to sell the permanent land development rights for their 180 Cherry Hill Road farm before the public auction Monday. But there was still a problem; it generally takes about six months for the trust to complete all the necessary steps to preserve a farm. The record was three weeks but this time, the trust had less than two weeks to complete the process.

“All hell broke loose” the Monday after Novak’s visit, executive director Karen Martynick said. Trust staff worked quickly to conduct a title search, negotiate a payment with the Leamans, take photographs of the farm and plot its buildings for baseline documentation. A survey necessary for the Leamans’ tax purposes could wait until after the deal. The trust’s board approved the farm’s preservation Sept. 15 and a week later the deal became official.

On Monday, the Leaman property sold for $1,425,000. “This farm was the most important in the Strasburg Rail Road corridor because it was our first,” Martynick said. Losing the farm to houses “would have been a tragedy.”

The Paradise Township farm is zoned agricultural, which allows one house to be built on every two acres. “We were concerned that probably a developer may buy it,” Mrs. Leaman said. “We couldn’t see how good farmland should be put into houses.”

In June, the Strasburg Rail Road agreed to give five cents from every ticket it sells, excluding Thomas the Tank Engine events, to the trust to save farmland along the railroad. It amounts to about $15,000 a year. Martynick said the railroad will pay about $5,500 to cover the transaction costs with the Leaman deal. The final costs for the property have not been determined, she said. They are in line with the trust’s average spending of between $500 and $600 an acre for development rights. Up to half of those funds will come from matching funds from the county, Martynick added.

Martynick said the trust is working on various outreach programs in the Strasburg Rail Road corridor, so preserving the next farm does not have to be an 11th-hour race. The trust wants to preserve as many of the 20 farms in the immediate view of the railroad line as possible. The farms comprise 1,100 acres. Martynick said she knows of no other similar business/farmland preservation partnership in the nation.

The trust’s executive director said a second “major business” will likely announce in November its intention to follow the railroad’s lead and commit a steady stream of funding to saving farmland. A press conference announcing the Leaman farm preservation was held today at the farm and a picnic is set for Friday at the railroad. The farm has significant road frontage along both Route 741 and Cherry Hill Road and is close to both urban growth and village growth areas.

But adjoining farm owner Jack Coleman, who bought the Leaman property for over $15,000 an acre, said he plans to continue to farm it. He has rented the acreage for crops since 2000. “It is a perfect connection to my farm,” he said today. “I will double-crop it.” Coleman’s Cherry-Crest Farm is well known for its Amazing Maize Maze.

Coleman said he needs acreage for the spreading of manure from a nearby hog operation. Also, his daughter may move into the historic house on the Leamans’ property, he said. The stone house, which has 22-inch-thick walls, was built in 1747. “We’re glad the farm went into the trust,” he said. “I don’t think anybody in this neighborhood wanted to see houses built.” Charles Leaman grew up on the farm, which his grandparents purchased in 1895. In the past, the Leaman family kept cattle, laying hens and brood sows on the farm, and grew corn, soybeans and some hay.

Charles and Janet Leaman bought the farm in 1960 and opened a bed and breakfast visited by thousands through the years. Their three children were not interested in farming, so the Leamans sold their farm animals in 1988. They are moving to Willow Street. Mrs. Leaman said she always enjoyed the railroad as a neighbor. “You can see the track from my kitchen,” she said. “We’re going to miss hearing the whistle every half hour.”

To Paradise and Back
by James Buescher
Lancaster New Era

Lancaster, PA - For the last train out on a Thursday, the Strasburg Rail Roads Lee Brenner dining car is hosting a pretty good crowd. There are two families cooling off with glasses of lemonade and iced tea; another’s hungry son is enjoying a Caboose, a deli-style ham sandwich served with homemade soup. There’s even an elderly couple sitting back by the galley, lingering over cheesecake and coffee as they reminisce about old-time train travel. Meanwhile, just a few miles away in Paradise Township, antiques dealer Sherry Mersky is handling a steady trickle of customers looking for high-end items like glassware, quilts and farm antiques known as primitives. Business is steadily better this year than the last, but so much better than it has been compared to two or three years ago, said Mersky, who needs to interrupt the interview every few minutes to ring up purchases. Were not necessarily seeing more people, said Mersky, the owner of Paradise Village Antiques at 3044 Lincoln Highway. But the folks we are seeing tend to have a little bit more money to spend. Two businesses, both in the tourism trade, and both of whom are having an above-board year.

But the question is is this happening countywide? And if so, what does that mean for the county’s tourism industry, especially now that Lancaster is moving into its third post-Witness decade? The surprising answer shows an industry in transition, a customer base splintering into niche markets and the importance of good business sense in a ho-hum economy. The days of Witness are long gone, said Mersky. Now, everything is shifting, and we’ve got to be prepared for that. Shifting or not, tourism in Lancaster County is nothing to sneeze at: Lancaster Country tourism currently generates about $1.7 billion per year in direct expenditures and $2.2 billion in indirect activity, creating a total of $3.9 billion annually a number roughly equal to the amount of cash McDonalds generated in 2004, or a little less than the entire gross domestic product of the African nation of Burundi. Tourism also directly employs 47,000 people in Lancaster County alone, making it the second leading business in Pennsylvania after health care. Still, its important to note that Lancaster’s tourism industry hasn’t always been like this in fact, in many ways, it seems closer to the boom-and-bust economies of the timber-milling Pacific Northwest than to any sort of settled East Coast economy. Although tourism to Lancaster County officially began in the 1860s and 70s thanks to a handful of articles in publications like the Atlantic Monthly and Lippincott’s Magazine widespread travel to the area only began in the 20th century with the arrival of the automobile. By the 1920s, thousands of tourists were motoring from New York to San Francisco via the nations first coast-to-coast transcontinental highway U.S. Route 30 and stopping over at the famed Hotel Brunswick in downtown Lancaster and going to see the Amish.

In 1952, a New York Times travel writer eulogized the Brunswick’s Saturday tour, leading to a boom of approximately 25,000 visitors that year. Three years later, the Broadway musical Plain and Fancy brought visitors by the thousands streaming into the area, increasing tourism by almost forty-fold. For the next 30 years, though, Lancaster County tourism was caught in a gradual downhill slide. The 1950s saw a rise in visitors after the 200th Anniversary of Intercourse celebration, only to see a decline throughout the 1960s. The scarcity of gasoline during the 1973 Arab oil embargo caused tourism numbers to plummet further and stay there, despite hopes the Bicentennial celebration might somehow renew mainstream interest in Lancaster County. For many, the final nail in Lancaster’s tourism coffin got pounded in in 1979, when the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island convinced many tourists their vacation dollars could be better spent elsewhere. Thanks to the publicity surrounding the TMI scare, Lancaster County’s tourism industry was rendered nearly lifeless for five years. Then, in 1984, Hollywood arrived. Sporting a script from producer Pamela Wallace, who now makes teen videos in Hawaii, and William Kelly, a former priest who died in February 2003 after a long career that included writing for the television shows Bonanza and Serpico, the film Witness featured Harrison Ford as a Philadelphia policeman masquerading as an Amish farmer to protect a young boy. The film originally titled Called Home grossed $65.5 million at the domestic box office and reached No. 2 at theaters behind Beverly Hills Cop. After that movie came out, business in Lancaster County just took off, said Mersky, eventually reaching its height in the early 1990s. Linn Moedinger, president of the Strasburg Railroad, agreed, noting business at the railroad hit its peak in 1991.

The early 90s were very good years, but (1991) was our biggest year, Moedinger said. Starting in the mid-1990s, things really started to cool down. It looked like business might have been heading up again in the early 2000s, but 9/11 really stopped people from traveling. We’ve been recovering from (the economic impact of the terrorist attacks) ever since, though now it seems the economy is picking up a little, so people have a bit more disposable income, Mersky said. But the question, Mersky said, is Who are the people? It seems to me that in the past few years the sort of tourist we’ve been getting here in Lancaster has been changing a bit. Mersky may be right and there’s even data available to support her theory. Information from the Pennsylvania Dutch Country Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Lancaster County Reservation Center, indicates Lancaster seems to be seeing something different from the typical vacationing family a family driving six hours or more to Lancaster County for a three- or four-day stay. Jenn Buchter, executive director of the Lancaster County Reservation Center, reports her organization is up 88 per cent in calls answered for June and July 2005 as compared to the same months last year, and nights booked at Lancaster County hotels are up 81 per cent. But those are mostly overnight stays, she said. Janet Wall, a vice president at Visitors Bureau, said about 8.3 million people are coming to Lancaster County, most from New York, Philadelphia and New Jersey.

A huge growth has been in event-specific tourists. Events drive visitors to our destination, and Lancaster County is simply filled to the brim with wonderful events, everything from rhubarb festivals to Octoberfests to the downtown Lancaster Art Walk, said Wall. People seem to be coming to see the context in which were set, she said. They’re not necessarily coming only to see the Amish. They’re also coming for shopping and dining, too. In other words, more tourists are coming, and many of them aren’t from Texas or Japan or California. They’re coming from our own back yard. And, while many tourists are traveling to Lancaster to get the Amish experience, these days they’re also looking for something more. To an extent, Lancaster is no longer spelled with capital letters. Now a good number of people want to see different Lancasters: Amish Lancaster, Farmers Market Lancaster, Train Lancaster, whatever, Mersky said. This market is splintering into niches. Which, of course, forces businesses to splinter with them. Back at the Strasburg Rail Road, management has been working hard to change with the times attracting more of those target-specific families looking for train as well as Amish attractions. These days, there’s a new miniature steam train from the 1920s known as the Cagney Steam Train, as well as Cranky Cars Hodges track cars for children from the 1930s. There also are events celebrating Thomas the Tank Engine, the hugely popular British children’s series that’s been playing on PBS for more than a decade. And then there’s the tried-and-true niche market the railroad has been attracting for years: rail buffs. Were told we have the largest retail book collection on trains in the world, said Susan Moedinger, manager of gift shops for the Strasburg Rail Road. Also, we’ve moved our gift shops to being open year-round. For people who love railroading, were here selling gifts all through the summer and all through Christmas. Plus, Moedinger said, the railroad attracts train buffs by having the appearance of another time: the summer of 1915. We have costumed engineers and mechanics working the steam trains, plus red-cap porters helping people on and off the train cars, she said. We even have knicker-clad news butchers selling our Road to Paradise commemorative magazine … which contains over 65 photographs and illustrations about railroading history. In Paradise, Mersky said she’s been busy making sure her business appeals to her own niche market: people who have come to the area for Lancaster County antiques.

Antiquers have a very different vacation experience. They’ve come specifically for whatever their passion might be, whether that’s 19th-century farm furniture or adding to their collection of cut-glass vases, said Mersky. They tend to use Lancaster as a home base and then do Philadelphia and Gettysburg while they’re here. But you have to remember that … gas prices are going up again and people don’t have a lot of money to spend now, Mersky said. To survive, you’ve got to focus on having as many small items as big-ticket items. And, you’ve got to have a good head for business, she said. Wall said the Visitors Bureau is changing with the times, doing events that appeal to many different groups at once. Next year, for example, the bureau will focus on promoting from-farm-to-table foods with the 2006 FlavorFest. Folks who come here are looking for a quality wholesome experience, Wall said. They want simplicity and escape from the hustle and bustle of their daily lives. Mersky, though, thinks the industry will continue to splinter. Personally, I think the next big thing is going to be shopping, she said. I think people are going to start coming here to buy big-ticket items, things like large dressers or a dining room table with chairs. Here you can buy things handmade by the Amish or sought after by thousands of antiques dealers and you can buy them so much cheaper in Lancaster County than you can in New York, she said. But perhaps no one knows more and is able to forecast the industry better than those working in the county’s tourism trenches. Betty McCormack, attendant on the first-class Marion Parlor Car at the Strasburg Rail Road, said she doesn’t think there will be much of a real change in Lancaster County’s tourism industry in the foreseeable future. The economy goes up and it goes down, but folks are still the same, she said. People love coming here to see what we have … . Lancaster County is a piece of living history. In four years of working here on the Strasburg Rail Road, I’ve only had one complaint, she said that the ride is too short. People love Lancaster County. They’ll keep coming back.