(slow pleasant music) - Well, this charming town along the Susquehanna River exists and prospers due to Ludwig Derr.

He came to America in 1750, and he landed at Philadelphia, but then he heard about the Susquehanna River and he really liked the Susquehanna River.

He was in Buffalo Valley around 1763, exploring and seeing what was here.

Then by 1769, he brought his family, and he built a large log cabin.

Now, it's a white clapboard house at 34 Brown Street.

He then built a mill race for his gristmill.

And he started at Buffalo Creek, and he built it largely by hand, then he was 45 years old.

You come around to the borough building, we have the original millstones displayed outside the borough building.

This was an agricultural valley, of course, they all had grain to be ground, and they brought it to the grist mill.

And if you were poor, and you didn't have funding to pay for the grinding of your grain, he gave it to you free.

Even then he was a community minded person.

After the revolutionary war, settlers began coming back and Ludwig joined with another gentleman and they laid out his tract in home sites.

(muffled commotion) He felt he would go to Philadelphia and he would sell more, and have more people come here to live.

Herein becomes the great mystery of Ludwig Derr.

(thoughtful music) He disappeared in Philadelphia, 1885, nobody knew what happened to him.

There was no sign of him.

So eventually his son, George went to look for him in Philadelphia.

George could not find him.

And so, he continued the work of his dad laying out the town and naming the streets, and going forward with the plans his father had had.

(tranquil piano music) 1812, Lewisburg was incorporated from Derrstown into Lewisburg.

We had a lot of goods.

We had a way that the valley could be prosperous.

We also had businessmen like William Cameron who helped us along the way, to transition this town from a pioneer settlement along the Susquehanna river, to quite a lovely Victorian charming town along the Susquehanna river.

- And William Cameron, (light cheerful music) he helped develop the crosscut canal here in Lewisburg, that connected the canal to the Pennsylvania canal system, five eights of a mile.

So he's very influential in the early growth and development not only of Lewisburg, but the surrounding area.

- The home I'm living in was completed in 1789.

During its early days, it was a general store along the Susquehanna river so that it saw a lot of activity, as a store.

- William Cameron had a brickyard business producing bricks.

He was into logging and lumbering.

He was in the coal business, and we're told that he would see to it that no one in Lewisburg would go without coal, and help keep them warm in the wintertime.

In 1852, (light uplifting music) he started the first bank in Lewisburg, in his house, 201 Market Street.

Lewisburg Savings died, walk-in vault is still there.

This goes back to when banks printed their own money.

And William Cameron himself was on the $5 bill.

One brother, James, at the age of 60, volunteered to take a command in the civil war.

His other brother was Simon Cameron, worked in Harrisburg, got involved in politics, was nominated for president.

Lost that nomination to Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln named him his secretary of war.

We know that there were significant national political conversations taking place in the Cameron House at 201 Market Street, now owned by Betty Cook, who is a historian in Lewisburg.

(bright music) - It was a working industrial town.

It was a town that was related to lumber.

They built barges down along the river here.

- The Lewisburg canals, the cross cuts helped transport the goods to Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Eventually the railroads came.

- 1869, and this was a rail line that ran from Lewisburg to Center County, Spruce Run, and then eventually that rail line was extended onto Bellefonte.

The Shamokin, Sunbury, Lewisburg Railroad eventually went north all the way into Tyrone.

And I imagine (muffled train noise) it had something to do with the paper mills in Tyrone.

The rail bridge, it was a roadway bridge as well.

So for carts and buggies and things like that, they had to pay a toll to go across it.

Eventually, there was a trolley line that came from Watsontown to Milton and then down to Lewisburg.

And then they would get to the other side of the toll bridge of the west branch of Susquehanna.

They would get there.

They would phone into the station house to get permission to come across the bridge.

(water rushing) The bridge has been washed out probably several times.

So that had to be rebuilt.

(train noise) Passenger trains criss-cross this town, the Lewisburg to Bellefonte Railroad.

Eventually that became part of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

And they had a station on the corner of second street.

The Reading Railroad, they had a nice big station with two waiting rooms.

I mean, this was a major place.

You had a university here too.

So everybody traveled that way.

And they put in a telegraph office that was state of the art at the time.

(soft bright music) - So when you come to visit Lewisburg, and you walk up and down the street and you feel the presence of Ludwig Derr, and Eli Slifer, and William Cameron, and you can actually see these remnants of the way we were.

You can understand why we say in Lewisburg, "We don't live in the past.

We live with the past."

- The Historic District guides renovation and preservation so that the exterior of buildings can still maintain their architectural detail.

By doing that and living in and maintaining older structures we're really preserving them for future generations.

(calm piano music) - The history adds to the charm.

We recognize history, but we think about that history in a way that prepares us for our future.

- Every generation is a cornerstone to the next.

And you have to look back with respect and admiration and appreciation to the people who, you know, had the passion and the foresight and the drive to create.

- There's much more here than what people think of, when they think of a small town that a large percentage of the buildings are on the national register of historic buildings.

There's much more than that.

- The reason the Lewisburg Downtown Partnership exists is because we have such a great downtown.

We have a business corridor in our downtown.

- And our mission is to ensure that the downtown is the heart and soul of Louisburg.

- It's collaboration with other groups in the community that have lifted our events and things to another level.

- Once you get started with this collaboration business, it catches fire.

The CommUnity zone has been together 10 years now and we're going into our 11th year.

And it's all about the community and bringing the community together and non-profits under one roof.

So we bring a lot of non-profits under my roof called partners and patrons, and we do things together.

So it's a real community spirit.

This community is unlike any community that I know.

It's so energized and people really have a strong sense of what it means to be a citizen, you know, an involved citizen.

- The folks in Lewisburg are just committed to this downtown in a very large way.

- It's a place where people feel welcome and invited.

We envision it to be kind of the economic and cultural magnet for the region.

All these different organizations and businesses that come together in the downtown is just vibrant.

- All these just indicate how much people are engaged with the downtown area.

And there's four buildings that the university, with its own funds, with state funds, and with federal grants, was able to purchase and remodel.

The wonderful Barnes and Noble at Bucknell bookstore is a gorgeous building.

I understand that used to be a wonderful hardware store.

And then the old post office and courthouse, we acquired that for our Office of Development, and then also the art gallery and the Small Business Development Center.

We purchased and remodeled these buildings.

We have well over a hundred employees working in town.

And also the only escalator in the Union County, I'm told is in the bookstore.

(light upbeat music) The Campus theater is an icon in town, and it is an...

I always called it a gem.

It's an art deco gem.

- The building was built in January of 1941 by the Stiefel brothers, Oscar, Barney, Harold, and Morris.

It was designed by the architect, David Supowitz.

And he was renowned for his revivalist art deco architecture.

He built 24 theaters like this in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and of those 24 there are only 5 remaining today.

And, we're one of them.

In 1953, Morris Stiefel's son took over managing the theater with his wife, Jacquie.

Harold and Jacquie started and maintained many of the community outreach programs that we still continue today.

One of which is a family film series that we do around the holidays.

We offer it free in exchange for a canned food donation.

And we created the mezzanine so that we could open the space up for community events.

The Campus theater is very committed to our involvement in, and collaboration with other community partners.

We do several live performances every year.

One that we just started that we're very excited about is the "Live from Lewisburg Variety Show," which is very similar to a "Prairie Home Companion," sort of, variety show with lots of different talent.

There's just something for everyone.

It's really a nice show.

It's the first thing you see when you come to the center of town, that wonderful neon marquee, which again, is all original.

Someone will stop me on the sidewalk, many times it's older folks, and they'll relay the stories about coming here as a child and watching a matinee.

(muffled applause) So this place is the centerpiece of their memories, their childhood memories.

In 2001, the theater became a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.

And in 2011, Bucknell University actually purchased the physical building, (light relaxing music) did a complete renovation and restoration.

- In fact, when I was being recruited to the university, I saw it being remodeled by a Bucknellian, an alum, crawled up on the scaffold to look at the restoration of the painted ceiling.

I imagined Michaelangelo in the Sistine chapel.

You like the place, you love the place.

You're proud of your work.

You see the effect of your work.

You experience the love and loyalty of others.

And I think it's all those things combined.

(light relaxing music ending) When the university was founded almost 180 years ago its name was the University at Lewisburg.

(light cheerful music) So I think from the very beginning, there was a tie, a deep synergy between town and gown, as we say it today.

And that has only grown over the decades.

So we're still a small school, but we're a big small school.

We have 3,600 students at the core of the university, the College of Arts and Sciences, but we also have a wonderful College of Engineering.

And the, now only five year old, Freeman College of Management.

My colleagues at the university and our students are proud of the university, of course.

We have over 50,000 living alumni and they love coming back to school and coming back to Lewisburg.

So whether they're here now, or were here long ago, there is great pride in the institution, but they recognize that the institution is part of this greater area.

Through the campus theater, through the WEIS center, through our music hall, through the poetry center, we do a lot that is accessible to the public as well.

And so we'd like to think of ourselves as a strong partner in providing a rich cultural milieu for Lewisburg and the greater surrounds.

(light cheerful music ending) - I wanted to just give a shout out to Lewisburg for really instilling in me a love for the arts.

When I was a little girl, (light joyful music) we took a bus trip to far away Lewisburg and we came to Bucknell university.

Bucknell has an amazing collection of art that was donated by a gentleman named Kress.

And the beautiful paintings that I saw as a little girl are still there, they're in the Samek gallery.

- We have had a very active arts community for years and years.

The Arts Council itself started over 50 years ago.

And then they grew and established our Lewisburg arts festival, which takes place at the end of April.

It's an annual event.

- We think of ourselves as an intersection between art and artists and art lovers.

- Not only do we have the arts festival, it's this where they stroll through the arts, we have music in the park, which takes place every Wednesday in the summer, so the families can go out and picnic and enjoy a performance outside.

We also have the ice festival, for example, that's another great event where we have artists in the area.

Oh, we had Shakespeare in the park, can't forget that either.

We recognize and appreciate all the arts and encourage our community to participate.

Now, don't be a bystander, participate.

You know, you can be part of the photography club.

You can do sidewalk chalk.

Anybody could do that and just have fun with it.

And I think once people engage and have some fun, they can start to appreciate it even more.

(light joyful music ending) (soft delightful music) - The Arts Council was so delighted a year and a half ago to help Jim Reed, who is an artist in town, get funding for the last of his murals that are in Cherry Alley.

- To take a really old back of a building that nobody ever saw before, and to transform it into something beautiful and magical and fun.

The Arts Council is an all volunteer organization.

None of us gets paid to do any of this.

We do this because we love it.

I want people to really have the opportunity to be an arts maker and feel like they're fulfilling a part of their creative personalities too.

(soft delightful music ending) (light energetic music) - During COVID of all times, people needed something positive.

So we came up with "Lewisburg in Lights."

So we did a walk around town and we decided all the dark spaces and got some ideas, put it out there to artists, and you know, to see if they wanted to design things.

We encouraged the businesses and it went from there.

And now Lewisburg is a place where people wanna come for light.

- This lovely little town is two towns.

It was am agricultural market town, and it still looks like that.

And many of the buildings are still in keeping with that.

And then at night, it turns into this kind of magical kingdom, when those lights go on and up the trees and the buildings.

- We started with a certain amount of streets, Market being one of them, and then after the first year, people said, "Can't we have those green lights on my street?"

And we decorated the gazebo and so on and so forth.

So that's what got it started.

(fun guitar music) - "Live from Lewisburg," the summer series or the live music that we started.

We can put something together, we can do it outdoors.

We can do it safely, and we did.

And then the next year, the Arts Council joined us.

- This series, this summer is gonna be in the churches, in the sanctuaries.

So we're gonna do music in five different churches over the summer.

The acoustics in these places are absolutely to die for.

And architecturally, they're beautiful.

- We're so much more together than we are individually.

And I think that's a part of what really makes this community because it's the organizations, but the organizations are made up of residents.

The organizations are made up of people who come to Lewisburg to work.

People who come to Bucknell to work.

And occasionally they're supported by people who just come to visit.

- It's community building, it's capacity building.

It's having people that recognize the importance of one another.

- This is a great place.

Come and visit us, come start a business here.

You'll thrive.

(upbeat music continues) (upbeat music fading out) (bright music) - Anywhere around Lewisburg, you will see the farms and that's where we're getting our product from.

- I love working my farm.

I know where every stone is in that farm 'cause I've been there all my life.

Having people there, for me, is probably the most rewarding thing.

I just love having people on my farm and be able to talk to 'em.

- They have a lot of events to involve people.

They have a corn maze in the fall, and they have egg decorating.

But things that involve people, and bring them to the farm market and teach them a little bit about what goes on in the production of their food.

- The different practices that we enact on our farm to eventually help us to get to a place of sustainability.

- Sustainability is only possible through collaboration and partnership, not just the farmers working together, but also the restaurants and the markets.

- We are blessed to have so much agriculture in this valley, it's the largest industry.

And because it is here, I believe that people could take advantage of it a little bit more than what they do.

- From the start, we've always done farm-to-table, I think that's part of our cuisine.

But I think we've embraced it more in the last several years than ever before.

- The partnership between the restaurants and the farmers, it seems to me to be unique.

- We do a lot of our own baking.

We make our own pastries and things like that.

But we're doing also a lot of research, and talking to the farmers.

And we do have farmers that will just plant things for us, which is very nice also.

- We are so seasonal.

That's what makes it very difficult to have consistency in your menu.

- We have a lot of people come because they feel that it's much more nutritious.

It's much more in season.

It's the freshest that they can have.

It's a challenge, but in some ways it's simpler, because it's just what you want to do.

It just makes it fun.

- It's a labor of love.

It certainly isn't for the money.

- [Patti] There's wonderful markets around here.

It's a vibrant asset in town and certainly, so many residents try to be there at lunchtime when the smell of sausage, and all the kinds of food all over the market, and people hustling and bustling.

And in the summer, there's all kinds of vendors on the outside as well as the inside.

So it's a really fun place to go.

And if you have visitors, everybody wants to go to the Lewisburg Market.

- Buying things local has become a way and it's nice to see that people are doing it more.

I have talked to customers, and what they're doing is maybe having a drink at one restaurant, walking around town, having an appetizer at another restaurant.

- Lewisburg is a walkable, bikeable community.

We're a walking and biking town.

And this is something that I think we've been leaning a lot more into recently.

We've built a rail trail that connects Lewisburg with Mifflinburg.

A lot of people when you talk with them, say that's our biggest resource here in the borough.

And Bucknell University is also putting in some new trails and has a part of this project going on in Hufnagle Park, where we're extending that rail trail.

- And now we're building this new greenway between downtown and the university.

It's just a wonderful new addition to the linkage between the university and the town.

- [Taylor] Lewisburg Neighborhoods was founded in 2006, 2007, around then, as a DCED Elm Street organization, to really focus on the revitalization of the Bull Run neighborhood.

People could brainstorm together, what they wanted to see in that park.

Since then, we've brought in over four million dollars in grant funding to improve that neighborhood.

- When you can walk out your door, and just walk right into town, and watch your kids sled on their butts through Hufnagle Park, with all of the lights in the wintertime, there's nothing like that.

- It is a perfect walkable community that has all these wonderful elements.

- [Allison] There's a skate park over by the pool.

We spend a lot of time there - Playworld has donated an amazing new playground, dedicated to first responders, that will be at the end of Hufnagle Park.

Beyond that will be a nature play area, for children who can play like Ludwig Durr played, in the dirt, and the leaves, in the water and the rocks, - The Buffalo Valley Rail Trail, and then the river literally right at Lewisburg's door.

We're now looking at an outdoor recreation location, for cycling tourism, hiking, backpacking, camping, canoeing, and kayaking.

An event that we have been the title sponsor for, called Unpaved at the Susquehanna River Valley, has been ranked as one of the top 10 gravel cycling events in the nation.

And they get to experience beautiful Lewisburg in the fall during peak.

And then they do a town takeover on Friday.

They do a tour of the pubs and the restaurants.

And we've worked with the Lewisburg Downtown Partnership, who moved their Fall Festival to the weekend.

And so now we've created a weekend event.

And they estimate the visitor spending that weekend is $2.3 million into the economy.

(people cheering) - The fact that it's, I think, an optimum size place to have a real sense of community.

And you can choose different things.

But you can also get to know a significant number of people.

- Lewisburg Sunrise Road area is one of the 46,000 Rotary Clubs around the world.

We meet at seven o'clock in the morning.

So that's one of the reasons that we're called the Sunrise Club.

During the pandemic, we've been able to lean into some activities, and actually give back.

The local library had an outdoor event to celebrate its reopening.

And we were able to volunteer, and help them out.

In February, during the Ice Festival, we challenged our president to participate in Lewisburg's Annual Polar Plunge.

She said she was willing.

Well, next thing you knew, we had raised more than $1,500.

We do something called the Rotary Youth Leadership Award, and it's a three to four day camp, where students have a chance to learn leadership skills.

We learned that students had access to snacks, and food pantries, but not hygiene pantries.

And so we provided them with things that would help them show up at school, to interact.

All the members in our club have a heart to serve.

They love this community, and they wanna give back in ways that are local and impactful.

Our Flags for Heroes program, erects 150 flags along route 15.

And we actually use those flags again, with Evangelical Hospital, as a show of support for the frontline healthcare workers.

- While much is driven by financial matters, ultimately, a culture matters.

A climate of where you work, and other things, start to matter.

There was an organization called the Evangelical Home, that was established in the early 1920s.

They wanted to open a home for the aged.

They wanted to open an orphanage, and they wanted to open a hospital.

They had established an infirmary, but the residents, and the orphans, weren't using the infirmary at a very rapid rate.

So they ended up opening it up to the community.

In 1953, the hospital was built on the property that it currently sits on route 15.

Over the course of time, multiple additions have been made to the hospital.

And it's now the 131-bed hospital that it is, and it all originated by the community.

Evangelical, joined with Geisinger.

And we acquired the Miller Center here in Lewisburg.

We then partnered with the YMCA that runs that day to day for us.

The goal of that facility is to work together, to improve the overall health of the community.

I see my work as family.

I see the community as family.

They're the reason we're in business.

- The Mediation Center was founded in 2010.

It was the idea of my passed husband.

In 2008, he had the dream to create a mediation center for the community.

And it was a very small core.

There, there were five of us to begin with.

We're all volunteers, 'cause we really didn't have a lot of money.

We had the support of the courts.

We had, you know, community support.

You know they don't really want to go to court, but sometimes their, you know, emotions get there.

And when they go to mediation, they get a better understanding of what they're facing in a custody situation.

And they'll walk in, and they'll say, "We will never resolve this.

"There's no way.

"We don't even talk, we can't even talk to each other."

And after two hours of sitting down, they will resolve their issues, or they're sitting at the end of the mediation, and they're sharing the pictures of their kids that, you know, and they will have said, "We have not spoken for three years.

"And this is the first time we've been able to sit down, "and talk to each other."

After we started the Mediation Center, and started growing, we started a service called Kids First, to resolve issues that kids come up with, from infants to teenagers.

We have collaboration with Children and Youth, Transitions of Susquehanna.

We're involved with them.

United Way, AmeriCorps.

There's 40 of us at this point.

40 volunteers have given 2,500 hours of volunteer service, to the community.

- The Lewisburg Prison Project is a nonprofit organization that provides resource assistance, education, for prisoners, not just the Lewisburg Penitentiary, but we look at all county jails, all state prisons, and all federal prisons, in the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

But we supply resources to the entire country.

So anyone in the country, in a prison, can write us a note, and we will provide them resources about their prisoner civil rights.

We're always looking at the penitentiary, it's the big stack at the big house.

If I'm paddling down Buffalo Creek, there it is.

If I'm at the quad, celebrating a graduation at Bucknell, it's there, you know?

And so I think all citizens here became curious about what it's like.

If I'm having a bad day, and I tell you I'm having a bad day, and you listen, and you say, "Wow, I'm sorry you're having a bad day.

"Maybe this is what you can do about it."

That's what our letters provide.

I mean, sometimes it's much more, where we say, "You need to tell someone there, "that this isn't working for you."

And we teach them the steps about how to take care of themselves, as far as their Constitutional rights.

We're advocates and all the synonyms for advocate describe Lewisburg as a community.

I mean, campaigner, supporter, encourager.

It is a community that advocates for itself, for others.

And, I think that's what makes it a beautiful place.

- My role as the Director of Bucknell University's Small Business Development Center, is right at the heart of those new businesses that are starting.

We're a resource for entrepreneurs.

And it's, it's myself, it's a team of business advisors, and it's also Bucknell University.

It's students, it's professors, it's colleagues throughout Bucknell who are engaged in Lewisburg and the region.

So the SBDC is a resource for people starting businesses, And for all the business owners of the region.

Students are coming from campus, and they're learning more about Lewisburg.

We do an annual competition that gives students the opportunity to pitch their own business ideas.

One of the most interesting long term stories from this biz pitch, or Business Pitch Competition, is a brother and sister from Bucknell, who started their own apparel company.

Uscape Apparel provides university spirit wear, to colleges throughout the country.

When those students make those connections with downtown business owners, we hope that, you know, they become even more engaged members of the Lewisburg community.

- Education is a way to build community, to build self, to build nation, to build world - Check the state designation of a good school district, and Lewisburg area schools always comes at on top, which is reflective of the people in the community, and their interest in education.

My husband and I came to Lewisburg in 1979.

He came as the superintendent of schools.

There was no middle school at the time, and it was an ongoing educational development that happened in the fifties, with my husband, who wrote the first book on the middle school.

Explaining to people the value of that age level of students.

He had established the first middle school in Pennsylvania, and one of the, there were only about five throughout the country at the time.

And today there is a beautiful middle school in Lewisburg.

It is now the Donald Eichhorn Middle School.

- Lewisburg is beyond a doubt, the only school that I would want my kids in.

It's a fantastic school system.

They are very much involved with the community.

- One of the things that really impressed me when I first moved here was how involved the parents are in their children's education, from volunteering within the classroom, or even their willingness to support efforts.

As an example, Lifting up Lewisburg, which was a campaign in partnership with our Green Dragon Foundation, to be able to provide any kind of monetary assistance to families that would have had some negative impact from the pandemic.

We always had a great academic program for our students.

And I've never worked with a group of students that were as articulate, vocal.

They want to become involved in civic causes in the community.

There's a true sense that you are a part of something here in Lewisburg.

- I also gotta give a Go Dragons for for the accomplishments of the, the boys soccer team.

You know, that has been one of the things that I'm most proud of, is seeing a community rally around the youth of our community, and, you know, cheering them on state championship.

As I said, the fourth star on the crest here.

- We find a way to make sure that every student can take advantage of all the opportunities that we have.

They're starting to make decisions about what careers they want to pursue.

Our job as educators is not to just impart knowledge, and information on them, but it's really to mentor, and help guide them in that process.

- I'm Lewisburg Class of 2000.

And so the last time the building went under a renovation as a Lewisburg area, high school, I was in it, which was fun, to then take 9,000 square feet of it, and repurpose it into something new and wonderful.

- Lewisburg Children's Museum started as a text message.

I was at a children's museum with my own two kids and being an engineer myself, I thought, ooh there's so many neat things that could be designed for a children's museum.

And so I texted Abby and said, "We should start a children's museum."

And, fortunately she said, "Okay."

The rest is history.

We immediately formed the business, filed 401(c)3 status, got a board together, of a bunch of wonderful volunteers, friends, people willing to put in the time, and the talent, it took to design and pull things together.

And we worked very closely with the Melburgers, because they were in process of writing the repurposing proposal for the old high school.

- There's some other organizations that have come in, and made it a really vibrant and fun place for children.

There's a ballet school, that's on the second floor as well.

So we often hear ballet music happening, and see little ballerinas pass by.

And so what was a high school, has now turned into a place for little people.

- The Lewisburg Children's Museum is a hands on museum.

So all the exhibits are interactive and educational.

- Lewisburg Children's Museum is a place for moms of relatively young children.

They can go, they can play, they can feel safe.

- We have staff that have been with us from the beginning, and they do everything they can.

They love kids.

They get really creative with, I would consider, very inexpensive materials, doing really great things.

- This project would not have been possible without the various donors, sponsors, partnerships, and support of the Lewisburg community specifically, but also the surrounding areas.

- The thing I always need to say is thank you.

The museum would not have been possible, without a heck of a lot of good will, and people's time and talent and treasure.

- Lewisburg is a community that bridges the old and the new.

- Purity Candy started out.

The original owner was a candy maker in Williamsport, and he was traveling on the train, trying to find out where to start a new shop.

And he ended up in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

And I have his old diaries.

His son sold it to the people I started working with, Buck and Arlene Zeber, and my parents got it from a friend of theirs.

There was a Bill Thomas who owned it in the middle.

The adaptability that is needed to keep a shop in business a hundred years is mostly the story of Purity Candy.

Our peanut butter smoothies, which my father and I came up with, that's a best seller.

- Chocolate covered pretzels.

You need to get some of those and take some home today.

- All our, like, original cream recipes are the same.

Maybe the flavors have changed over time.

And so you're always trying to update and give people what they want.

There is a little bit of pressure knowing that you didn't start this.

This has been going on for years and years and years.

Now I've been the president of the company for 25 years, and the candy maker for 33, but we had just bought it in February.

And the next month, the governor shut us down.

We went back to the diaries.

And once again, back to the adaptability.

We found out that this isn't the first time that Purity has been in a crunch.

This is the second pandemic.

The first one was the 1918 Flu.

The Great Depression, two world wars, sugar rationing in World War II for a candy company.

We went back to the past, read a little bit, and then just did what we could do to keep going.

Now you are a part of this history.

And yeah, we've got great customers.

That's how you stay in business for 115 years.

- Lewisburg Garden Club started in 1948.

It was an offshoot of the Lewisburg Civic Club, which was an all women's organization.

The main goal of the Garden Club in Lewisburg is beautification.

Work, grow and share with enthusiasm.

The Lewisburg Garden Club has worked on the Hufnagle Park.

We helped design that garden with the approval of the Lewisburg Borough Council.

But we're very active as far as designing gardens and working in gardens and things like that.

Gardening is definitely therapeutic, and I see changes in people.

They just come alive.

I don't know very many people that don't like flowers or don't like some kind of color in their life.

And one of the things about flowers is that you have all range of colors and textures, and they're just beautiful to work with.

For some people, it's a very spiritual experience being close to nature, things like that.

It's a great hobby, it really is.

And for some people, it's a profession too.

If you can put a seed into a pot with soil and watch it grow, that's gardening.

There's no limitation as far as that goes.

- The Lewisburg Community Garden is this amazing program, and this beautiful space.

And the garden is a partnership between the Borough of Lewisburg and Bucknell University.

So I think of it as a really good example of what town and gown can do together.

The Borough provides the land, and does some of the maintenance, and then Bucknell provides staffing to run the program of the garden.

We have individual spaces for community members to rent.

However, we also have half of the garden set aside just to grow food to donate to local food pantries.

So we invite people to volunteer every Tuesday and Thursday evening from 4:00 to 7:00 throughout our growing season, from April through October, to help us with this project of growing about one ton of food every year.

It encouraged people at Bucknell University to start a similar program on campus.

Professors could bring their class to the farm to engage directly with that space.

My favorite thing about the Lewisburg Community Garden is what happens between people.

They get to know each other really well.

Including Bucknell students, who often don't have opportunities to meet people sort of beyond the university.

So seeing people connect with each other, share food with each other at some of our potlucks during the summer.

By being in that space and doing some physical work to provide food for other people, it does make people think more about their obligation to others, their obligation to the world.

That is part of building community, right?

- My wife Amy had an idea about five and a half years ago.

The Lewisburg Victorian Christmas Parade had been a fixture in Lewisburg since the late '70s or early '80s.

What if we did a Nutcracker instead of the Victorian Christmas Parade?

She especially had in mind the concept of a community Nutcracker.

And this means that you throw open the audition process, you throw open the whole performance process to the entire community.

And this includes from fundraising to performers.

We went first to River Stage Community Theater to see if they would be interested in partnering with us.

Turned out they'd been looking for a Christmas show.

So they were happy to go in.

And next, we reached out to the Lewisburg Downtown Partnership.

We're really trying to push Victorian Lewisburg, and there are a lot of people who really like that sort of thing.

So we're like, okay, Lewisburg Victorian Nutcracker.

Amy was a professional ballerina.

Her studio name, Strictly Ballet, really says what she does.

She doesn't do jazz and tap and modern.

She's a ballerina, she does ballet.

We built a lot of sets and props, and the second year we bought a lot of costumes.

Then the pandemic came.

We really asked a lot of the performers that year.

That was also the first year that we had guest artists come from New York City.

And the Thursday before our Saturday performance, the governor announced that the state was shutting down Saturday.

We had to do our performance on our dress rehearsal night.

It was a really remarkable experience.

The kids did great.

The guest artists were beautiful.

And even, we had to live stream that performance primarily.

We had like 50 audience members, family members, but otherwise only live stream.

And that was something brand new we'd never done before, River Stage had never done before.

And it just came off beautifully, I have to say.

And again, we take all comers.

So a lot of our performers aren't dancers at all, and still every single person on that stage pours themselves into it.

And you can feel the audience feeling that, and the back and forth.

It is a remarkable experience.

- The Lewisburg Cemetery started in 1848 but we have early settlers there going back to the Revolutionary War and before.

It was set up as part of the rural cemetery movement that was en vogue at the time.

So it was set up to be a park-like place.

The most visited site in the cemetery is the grave of Christie Mathewson, the great Hall of Fame baseball player.

And people come not only from all over the country, from all over the world, if they are baseball fans.

And he's not the only major league baseball player.

We have Moose McCormick, and we have Walter "Heavy" Blair.

And every spring we put a wooden bat and a baseball on Christie's grave.

Sometimes they disappear and I have to go to flea markets looking for a wooden bat.

We also have a Medal of Honor winner, George Ramer.

We've done a Civil War veterans tour.

We've done a World War I tour.

We do have at least six African American Civil War veterans.

One of them had never gotten a marker.

I did a lot of research, and eventually the VA changed the records and we had a lovely ceremony for Milton Airey, and gave him a proper sendoff.

Bucknell is very proud of their three Marys.

They graduated between 1894 and '96.

One is Mary Wolf, who became a medical doctor.

Mary Harris got her PhD, and she became known as a prison reformer.

And the third Mary is Mary Bartol Theiss.

She went on to get her PhD in classics.

She became a professor herself.

And then, with her husband, wrote many books including one on women's suffrage.

She also was a suffragist.

Every person makes a difference in her or his own way.

- You can't talk about the League without mentioning the suffragettes because of their painful journey to get the 19th amendment passed and get the women their votes.

Thus, the League for Women Voters was born, and that was 102 years ago.

Up until that time, they didn't get to read newspapers, and they didn't get to sit in the back rooms and talk about the issues of the day, because if they needed to know any of that stuff, their husband would tell them.

We were formed in 1954.

Before the end of the year, we had put out our first, their version of the "Voters Guide."

The electorate has to be educated still to this day, all of us.

Current issues, meeting the candidates.

They work with high school to get them, first of all, registered, to get them educated to that point, and then a lot with the Bucknell kids.

We actually have a really good collaboration with the Children's Museum.

We have a voting machine in there.

Not a real one, but a voting machine that the kids can practice voting.

Because that's where it starts.

Your vote really does count.

People have won by one vote or lost by one vote.

The more you involve people in this process, and the more they are aware of what's going on, the more they are likely to step up.

- The library offers so many services.

We like to say that it's a library for all.

The public libraries actually started in the 1900s as part of a library that formed through the Presbyterian church.

And in 1902, it was dedicated as the Himmelreich Memorial Library.

The community was growing, and a bigger space to hold our books and our programs and people was needed.

And through the kindness of Dan and Audrey Baylor, a plot of land was donated in the current Brookpark Farm.

A library was built, its doors opened in 1989 as a public library for Union County.

We've had three expansions since 1989.

It just goes to show you how the community is growing, and how important a part in that community the library is that it also had to grow with the community.

The families in the Lewisburg area were growing, and we needed more room for our children to have a space of their own for story time and for hands-on learning.

And so that's how the addition of the children's programming room came about.

The library is really a community hub.

We have a very active senior population, and we have an active young family population.

We have the tools collection, so people can check out tools if they need to work on a home repair project and they don't wanna purchase the tool, they just need it one time.

We have a cultural pass collection that offers 10 museum passes to local places like the Children's Museum, The Corning Museum of Glass.

Lewisburg is very community minded.

And I think without the help of our donors, and our volunteers and our dedicated staff, and the people that just use our library every day.

I mean, without all working together, we wouldn't have this wonderful library that we have.

- The Poetry Path is a route through downtown Lewisburg with 10 stops.

Each of those stops is connected thematically with its location.

The Poetry Path was begun in 2012 by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, by the former director, Shara McCallum.

The path aims to connect people with poetry in their everyday lives.

Each of the stops has a theme that helps a person to reflect on where they are.

As I go about my morning commute, which is fortunately just a walk from my home in downtown Lewisburg to my office in the Stadler Center for Poetry, there are several stops along that way.

So I've had the opportunity to see a couple stopped together and quietly reading the poem in front of the three churches.

I've seen people on their dog walks, pausing to look at the poem and then going on.

One time when I was walking to campus in a snowy winter setting with fresh snow everywhere, I noticed that one of the placards had already been cleared away so someone could see the poem.

And I loved the sense that someone had been there before me and had cleared off the snow to read.

This past fall, Michelle Rosenberg, the reading specialist at Linntown Intermediate School, approached the Stadler Center.

She told us that Linntown Intermediate School would love to have its own poetry path.

And we've collaborated to create a new path that will be child-centric for fourth and fifth graders at Linntown.

The first iteration of a change for that poetry path will allow student poems to be there.

One of the joys of poetry is that huge range of feelings, backgrounds, imagery that people bring to it.

Day by day, what Lewisburg is, and what it means shifts for me in my experience.

- There's a difference between a place being beautiful and being a small town, and a community being beautiful.

And Lewisburg is that place where you get both.

- There is just something about the town.

It is special.

It's the people.

- It's the consistency, and the deep concern and love for the community that the people who live in the area have.

- We just have an amazingly generous community.

- It's in the museum, it's in youth sports, it's in our schools.

It's everywhere.

- The opportunities that are here, come and explore Lewisburg for those opportunities.

There's an opportunity at every corner.

- If somebody wants to make something happen, we're gonna find a way to make it happen.

- With a willingness to work and contribute, you'll soon find yourself overwhelmed with opportunities to be involved.

- We have so much to offer, and we have so many residents who are willing to give up their time.

They recognize how important those things are, and you take advantage of those moments.

- It tells you a lot about the people here.

And I've been singing this tune for a long time, that it's a very special place.

- You have this sense of being part of a real live community in the most basic way you can define community.

- I am the fourth generation of Wagners to live in Lewisburg.

I'm very proud of that.

And I think that I have had every opportunity to live a very rich life.

- Our residents really make it happen.

They want to share what we have.

- And that's what people do here.

They just keep passing it along.

- Camaraderie, sustainability, livability, and fun.

- It has a commercial, a historic, and a cultural and educational role.

I love the future in front of it, what it's doing now, what it has done in the past, and hopefully what it'll continue to do.