Eastern Pennsylvania Mountain Communities and Homes

If you are looking for peace and tranquility when choosing where to retire, the mountains might just be the place for you! When you live near the mountains, you enjoy the natural wonder of the landscape including: clear starry night skies, the sounds and stillness of nature, and of course all of the hiking one could ask for. Whether you take advantage of the mountainous sports such as skiing or canoeing, or rather relax in solitude, the mountains are the perfect place to retire. Retirenet.com offers a wide range of mountain communities from The Appalachian’s to The Sierra Nevada’s and everything in between. Once you have decided where you want to retire, come check out our premium 55 plus communities nestled in the heart of the mountains. Retirenet.com has listings varying from the more affordable, all the way to the most luxurious mountain retirement communities. Explore our beautiful mountain listings below and happy home hunting!

The Eastern Pennsylvania region takes in the easternmost third of the state, minus the metropolitan Philadelphia area. It varies greatly in character, from the quiet pastoral landscapes in the southern part (which includes a large portion of the famed "Pennsylvania Dutch" country), to the industrial cities of Allentown, Scranton, and Wilkes-Barre farther north.

The Pennsylvania Dutch area is a rolling, wooded landscape, highly fertile and watered by the Susquehanna River. It has long been famed for the produce of its farms, and especially noted for the Amish folk who settled here originally in the 18th century. Many of the early immigrants and their families never adopted English; and their cultural isolation was a decisive factor in keeping the region essentially agricultural and rural. Today, it is becoming steadily more popular with affluent ex-urbanites from the adjacent Philadelphia region, and it has long been popular with tourists.

To the north, the higher proportion of English speakers assured that when industrialization came, it would come here rather than in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. And it came with a vengeance: coal and steel production made Pennsylvania an economic powerhouse in the 19th and 20th centuries. Allentown and the surrounding Lehigh Valley make up the third-largest population center in Pennsylvania; and although Bethlehem Steel, once one of the largest producers in the world, closed down in 2003, the area is still home to smaller industries ranging from Crayola to Olympus and Mack Trucks.

Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, in the northern tier of the region, were once dominated by steel production and especially coal mining; but the steel companies moved and the mines played out, and the region became more famed as part of the "Rust Belt." But the cities endure, and have turned more to tourism as an important part of their economy, helped by their proximity to the Poconos to the east.