DERRY TOWNSHIP, Pennsylvania — The mid-morning sun danced cleanly off the calm waters of Keystone Lake, casting a bright sheen over a scene that feels entirely unstuck from time.
Along the shoreline, kayakers glide across the glass-like water. Fishermen sit quietly by the causeway, casting lines in hope of a bite. Under the shade of the locust, maple, tulip, and oak trees, families crowd around picnic tables, sharing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from home as they shake off the heavy heat of a Pennsylvania summer.
It is a serene, almost languid tableau. It is also a testament to American resilience and our ability to reinvent ourselves, as the lake and rolling state park were built directly atop the industry that once defined Western Pennsylvania: coal.
Long before it was a haven for swimming, fishing, kayaking, camping, and sunbathing, this very dirt belonged to the Keystone Coal and Coke Company. In 1909, the company dammed the convergence of McCune and Davis runs, creating this 78-acre lake for a purely industrial purpose: supplying the massive amounts of water needed to wash bituminous coal and quench the fiery coke ovens at the nearby Salem No. 1 Mine.
The water the children splash in today once flowed gravity-fed through 2 miles of wooden pipes to fuel the region’s roaring steel industry.
Just a short walk from the sandy beach, beneath the park’s cabin area and the Hillside Campground, lies a labyrinth of abandoned, sealed-off mine tunnels. In those dark spaces, particularly the Salem No. 2 drift mine, which opened in 1938, local miners labored on their hands and knees inside coal seams just 2 to 4 feet high.
When the industrial demand cooled, Pennsylvania acquired the land and the company’s stone executive retreat in 1945, turning a private corporate playground into Keystone State Park. Today, that historic stone lodge serves as the James A. Kell Visitor Center, housing artifacts from the very miners who laid the foundation for the community.
Located in Westmoreland County, Keystone State Park is one of 124 state parks spread across Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. For generations of Pennsylvanians, these public lands have provided the setting for some of our most enduring traditions. Today, as families look for affordable ways to vacation and rediscover what is often right in their own backyards, these parks are playing an even more vital role. They are saving the family vacation.
I watched children ranging from toddlers to teenagers chase minnows, scoop up handfuls of sand, and sift through it for quartz, granite, rounded pebbles, and fragments of sandstone, shale, limestone, and bituminous coal. They picked out their favorites and carried them home in sand pails.
Dozens of families rested on blankets spread across the dune grass between the sandy beach and the lawn, taking a break from the sun as their children emptied out the treasures they had collected from the lakebed. Conspicuously absent were the devices that so often occupy both children and parents.
That absence may be common in the heart of the country, but it can seem almost inconceivable in a culture where social media increasingly shapes how everyday life is experienced and presented. There were no influencers posing on boogie boards. The children riding them were too busy mastering the balance needed to stay upright on the water. The same was true of those paddling canoes and kayaks.
In an era dominated by algorithms, notifications, and glowing screens, Pennsylvania’s state parks offer a radical alternative: a place to disconnect. Here, children aren’t hunched over tablets or lost in video games. They are outside, experiencing the physical world with their bare hands.
On the shoreline, children laugh as they learn the delicate, frustrating art of catching minnows with plastic cups. A few yards away, a group of toddlers digs through the sand like amateur geologists, proudly presenting ordinary river rocks as if they were precious gems — perhaps unaware that the dark stones they hold are the remnants of the bituminous coal that built their towns.
Out in the water, just inside the safety buoy line, older children face the gentle surf, figuring out the perfect balance required to ride a boogie board. Pickup games of volleyball were started at the far end of the beach.
These are the moments that build our social fabric. Vacations are about “firsts” — the first fish caught, the first scraped knee on a boat dock, the first taste of independence.
JD VANCE ON FAITH, FATHERHOOD, AND FORGIVENESS
You don’t need an expensive flight or a five-star resort to give your children those memories.
You just need a full tank of gas and a map of the commonwealth. State parks are open, they belong to us, and they are waiting to remind our children how to explore.