Lancaster County is more than just a place.
It's also a state of mind and, judging by feedback on the Route 23 bypass plan, a far-flung one at that.
As the debate over the "goat path" corridor has flared anew in recent months, people across the land have piped up, worried that a new road would pave over some of the nation's most fertile farmland, split Plain Sect church districts and drive out Amish and Mennonite farmers.
Linda Gordon, who lives 3,000 miles to the west on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, recalled entering Lancaster County one evening as a January sunset colored snowy fields.
"This is a picture I've kept in my mind for 20 years," wrote the Washington state resident. "What will future visitors remember?"
Lynne Kirsch of Thorndale, Chester County, said she's followed the resurrected Route 23 proposal and other development issues with a sinking heart.
"If it's becoming like here," said Kirsch, who has long dreamed of retiring to the uncluttered Lancaster County landscape she discovered decades ago, "there's no point in moving there."
Signe McCullough drove eight hours from Hingham, Mass., to attend an East Lampeter Township municipal meeting Tuesday night.
She was part of a large audience that roundly criticized the supervisors for supporting the "Southern Alignment," one of several alternatives for Route 23 proposed by PennDOT, and for approving a high-density development by Keystone Custom Homes along the current highway.
At the meeting, Karen Martynick of the Lancaster Farmland Trust and Matt Knepper of the county Agricultural Preserve Board implored the supervisors to establish an agricultural security zone.
Two Amish men seconded the idea to resounding applause.
"That's why I'm here," one of the farmers told the supervisors. "That's why my sons are here."
Plain Sect pressure helped torpedo the new highway once before. Such solidarity heartens McCullough, who grew up in the county and once partnered with Amish craftsmen in selling handcrafted furniture.
Active in the citizen group Conestoga Valley Coalition, she's pushing for meetings between Amish and state leaders, who will decide the goat path's fate.
The coalition is soliciting involvement from "all kinds of people," including actor Harrison Ford, added McCullough, whose father-in-law is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian David McCullough.
Ford starred in the 1985 movie "Witness," a police thriller filmed on a local farm.
In 1994, the elder McCullough helped scuttle plans for a Disney theme park and real estate development near the Manassass National Battlefield in Virginia.
"I just became involved because I came home and heard what was happening," said Mrs. McCullough, the daughter of Narvon Clay Mine owner Cary Ahl. "I got rip-roaring mad!"
But how much influence outsiders can wield here is an open question.
"I think it's important people from outside the area weigh in because the Lancaster County economy benefits so much from tourist dollars," Martynick said. "But I think ultimately the elected officials ... are really looking to hear from people who live in that community."
Crawling with people
Not that Route 23 discourse hasn't already been dragging on sporadically for several generations.
County planners and others deemed the two-lane road overcrowded and unsafe back in 1966.
Planners at that time favored shifting the highway south and expanding it into a four-lane limited access route that would connect with the Pennsylvania Turnpike at Morgantown.
Pennsylvania included the proposal in its six-year highway plan, but the state ran out of money in 1970 and the road was never built.
In the 1980s, noted PennDOT spokesman Greg Penny, a plan to build a road that would shunt traffic from both routes 23 and 30 sparked protest from as far away as Europe and Australia.
Last December, the department announced that it was considering converting to a two-lane bypass the graded, but never paved, goat path abandoned to livestock 30 years ago.
The other options are to extend a two- or three-lane bypass through Leola, New Holland and Blue Ball south of the current road, or to do nothing.
The Lancaster Chamber of Commerce & Industry has recommended making the entire 14-mile corridor four lanes wide, in stages.
The Federal Highway Administration must approve the final design.
Feedback this time around has come from local residents and people who drive Route 23, said Mark Malhenzie, PennDOT senior project manager.
While some have heartily endorsed a new road, outsiders in touch with local media have predominantly opposed the project.
One couple even called Lancaster Newspapers from their home in Spain, according to Lois Duling of East Lampeter Township.
Still others who have come to know Duling and her Amish neighbors are monitoring the development controversy from Tasmania and Budapest, Hungary, she said.
"These people really care," added Duling, who with her husband, Irl, has adamantly resisted a bypass.
Attention from afar does not shock veteran road fighter Fred Daum, who said he's given more than 90 anti-sprawl slide presentations throughout the Northeast over the years.
"People are very concerned about the Plain Sect community and the Amish and their future," said Daum, whose house lies just off Route 23. But even so, he added, awareness is proportional to the growth people see in their own back yards.
These days, lots of yards are under siege.
Lynne Kirsch wrote of a Chester County "crawling with people" and clogged with traffic.
Linda Gordon, who noted that her ancestors settled in Lancaster County before the Revolutionary War, described how quickly strip malls, fast-food restaurants, broad suburban avenues and bright lights overran the strawberry and raspberry fields of bucolic Bainbridge Island.
"It would be easy to simply take out the word 'island' and instead insert the words 'Lancaster County'," she wrote.
Out of alignment
Ten years ago, the World Monuments Watch characterized this community as a cultural oasis becoming gravely unbalanced by commercial development.
But though people from other countries readily identify Amish farmers and their land with Lancaster County, said McCullough, a world traveler, many local residents don't fully grasp the significance of the area or the perils that overshadow it.
In fact, stakeholders near and far are split over some preservation issues.
The Coalition for Smart Growth last week praised East Lampeter for changing its R-2 zoning to allow up to nine residential dwellings per acre, a strategy that is supposed to concentrate development. (Please see statement, Page A11.)
But Jim Pratt said he moved here in 1998 partly because densely populated areas around Waterbury, Conn., "got out of control."
Supervisors chairman Glenn L. Eberly acknowledged during last week's meeting that his board has twice before nixed proposals for an agricultural security district.
East Lampeter Township is one of four local townships lacking the designation, which enables farmers to transfer development rights with the state's help.
"We're 100-percent in favor of preserving the farms" through zoning laws that do not tie the hands of future generations, Eberly said.
But Conestoga Valley Coalition attorney James Tupitza said such logic cuts both ways.
Zoning can change on a single nay or a yay. Blocking ag districts now will eventually force farmers to sell out as development pressure mounts, Tupitza predicted.
So will building a bypass, opponents contend.
Dee Durham, who directs the Kennett Square-based Safety, Agriculture, Villages and Environment Inc. citizens group, said she aims to demonstrate to East Lampeter Township officials that "there are other solutions than just building a mega-highway through the area."
Such projects induce growth, said Durham. She cited multiple studies done over the past 10 years showing that traffic increases over the long term (three years-plus) to 50 to 100 percent of the capacity of a new road.
Alternatives include calming traffic in appropriate places along the current road, adding turn lanes and, especially, building roundabouts at congested intersections.
Durham said PennDOT now favors such "sustainable" strategies outside Wilmington on Route 41, also targeted for a bypass for many years.
But in Lancaster County the department is no longer considering simply widening the old Route 23.
Malhenzie said PennDOT is preparing a draft Environmental Impact Statement. A public hearing will be held this summer.
Meanwhile, in February, PennDOT made its case to Amish farmers during meetings in the affected townships.
The month before, 73 Amish and "English" farmers sent a petition asking Gov. Ed Rendell and other state leaders to forget about a new road.
McCullough said she plans to follow up by brokering Amish meetings with Rendell and Sen. Bob Casey.
"Bob Casey has a particular interest because his father [the late Gov. Robert Casey] stopped the highway 20 years ago" after hundreds of Amish stood in opposition at public meetings, she said.
"I hope we can get a real movement started here," she added. "We don't know what we have. Everybody else does."
Contact Jon Rutter at jrutter@lnpnews.com.
