MECHANICSBURG, Pennsylvania — When you pull into Legacy Park, you can tell it was a farm just a few years ago. Today, the development is home to a yuppie brew pub, a soap boutique, and an environmentalist-themed coffee shop called Down to Earth Café, whose motto is “coffee with an impact.”
The clientele is upper-middle-class young families or retirees who arrive in Japanese cars and puffer coats. The staff have dyed hair and all sorts of piercings. Cumberland County is changing.
No county in Pennsylvania has grown more in population over the past 15 years: it is up 20% since 2010. Cumberland has lost about 14% of its farm land in five years, according to the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, which puts Cumberland in the top 10 Pennsylvania counties (out of 67) on that score. In 2000, about 28% of residents over the age of 25 had a bachelor’s degree or higher. Now, it’s 40%.
The changes are worrying Gary Eichelberg, a conservative on the County Commission.
“It’s definitely a more liberal crowd,” Eichelberg said over lunch at the Down to Earth Café.
He is worried about a Democratic takeover of the state after President Donald Trump leaves office. He speaks of the “T” that is Pennsylvania when you take away the Southeast (Philadelphia) and Southwest (Pittsburgh) corners. That T has always been how Republicans stayed competitive here. He fears the changes in Cumberland County will “break the T,” and make Republicans the underdogs for the foreseeable future.
This is not merely a Cumberland County thing. One county east of Cumberland is York County, which has grown by 11% since 2010. York is becoming more suburban, less rural, and depending on how you measure it, more Democratic.
Go one more county over, and you are in Lancaster, which is known as a sort of breadbasket of the mid-Atlantic. When you think of Lancaster, you might think of Pennsylvania Dutch selling pies from a farm stand. Now Lancaster, too, is also more populous, less rural, and less Republican than it was 10 or 15 years ago.
The county with the biggest shift toward Democrats since 2012 is the next county over, Chester, the outermost of Philadelphia’s collar counties.
The collar counties are Philly’s suburbs, and ground zero of the realignment of America’s upper-middle class: Former President George H.W. Bush won the four counties (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery) in 1988, 61% to 38%; former Vice President Kamala Harris, while losing the state, won those counties 57% to 42% in 2024.
Why has Chester swung so much more than the other collar counties in the Trump era? Because it was the last one to fully suburbanize.
Why have Lancaster, then York, and now Cumberland followed politically? To put it a bit provocatively, the Philly suburbs have been sprawling westward for decades, and now they have reached the doorstep of Harrisburg. And not everyone is happy.
“Years ago, it used to be agriculture,” said Josh, a 22-year-old who lives just outside of Cumberland County. “It ain’t like it used to be.”
Josh is a farmer drinking at Jen-Jen’s Rhythm and Brews in nearby Berlin. His father farms, his grandfather farmed, as did his great-grandfather. Back then, everyone was a farmer. Most of the fourth generation has not taken Josh’s route, and Josh thinks that’s a sin.
“My generation wasn’t to cash out on anything and everything he can,” Josh lamented.
He grows hay on land his family has long farmed. Some of the land his father rented has been sold for housing.
“We as farmers can’t compete with what the developers will pay…. A guy like me couldn’t become a farmer today,” without inheriting the land, Josh said.
He said he thinks Trump is trying to help.
“Trump might have been trying to make it better, to make sure the big corporations can’t buy all the land,” Josh said. “I believe that’s the main problem.”
Lots of longtime residents of Central Pennsylvania lament the suburbanization.
“It’s just not the same,” Harold said at the Pennsylvania Farm Show. “Used to be farms all over. Now you hardly see any.”
Like Josh, they try to make it be about Big Business or hedge funds, somehow profiting in some illicit way.
But really, it’s about homes. Yes, solar farms are swallowing up real farms, but mostly it’s about homes.
Pennsylvania is trying to slow the change through a suite of farmland preservation programs. Also, there are the Amish.
“I’m so glad that the Amish are moving in and buying up the farms,” said Gail, a middle-aged woman at the Pennsylvania Farm Show, “because if they don’t buy them up, they’re going to turn into developments.”
A lot of rural America, indeed, a lot of Pennsylvania, is emptying out, and it’s not good. The Cumberland Valley and environs are blessed in that they are attracting both families and employees. At least four baby strollers entered the Down to Earth Café in the hour or so Eichelberg and I spoke.
But the new folks, as is always the case, are a bit different from the old folks. You can tell them by their Japanese cars, the $6 lattes, and the local microbrews. They will go to Wolf Brewing Company at Legacy Park, but you will never find them at Jen-Jen’s.
The most salient political difference may be that the new folks are part of the professional-managerial class.
Jen-Jen’s is full of blue-collar capitalists. Josh runs his father’s hay business. Bryan Kuhn is a “hardcore Trumper” who used to own a roofing company. Last year, I met Travis, whose small business is digging graves.
The influx into Cumberland County comes from big new employers in Harrisburg, most of which are hospitals and the like. The new workers are not mostly doctors and nurses. They are administrators.
The managerial class is the heart of the Democratic realignment, while the guys who run body shops and the men they employ are the heart of the Republican realignment. The spread of the collar counties to Harrisburg is really the spread of the professional-managerial class across this beautiful landscape.
It’s a change. Whether it’s good or bad depends on whom you ask.