Editing Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania (section)

== History ==
There are two stories about the origin of the town's name. In one version it is named after Elizabeth Reeby, wife of Michael Reeby who sold the first building lots here in about 1795. The officially accepted history{{Citation needed|date=September 2020}} is that, in 1753, Captain Barnabas Hughes acquired land and laid out a town, naming it for his wife, Elizabeth. The early settlers were primarily [[Scotch-Irish Americans|Scots-Irish]] and [[Pennsylvania Dutch]]. In 1758 [[John Forbes (British Army officer)|General John Forbes]] supplied the expedition to [[Fort Duquesne]] with flour and oats and stationed a regiment here to protect his supplies.<ref>MacMaster, Richard K. “Philadelphia Merchants, Backcountry Shopkeepers, and Town-Making Fever.” ''Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies'', vol. 81, no. 3, 2014, pp. 342–63. [https://doi.org/10.5325/pennhistory.81.3.0342 JSTOR website] Retrieved 19 May 2023.</ref>

Elizabethtown became a borough in 1827, and a railroad was built through the area in the 1830s. The town was primarily agricultural until the early 1900s, when the Klein Chocolate Company (now part of [[Mars, Incorporated|Mars, Inc.]]) and several shoe factories, the last of which closed in 1979, opened. [[Elizabethtown College]] was established in 1899, and the [[Freemasonry|Masonic]] Homes, now the Masonic Village,) followed in 1910.

Following the end of [[World War II]], Elizabethtown grew rapidly, more than doubling its population between 1950 and 2000. Homes and businesses expanded into nearby farmland, making [[Urban sprawl|sprawl]], farmland preservation, and revitalizing the downtown area important issues.<ref>MacMaster, Richard. ''Elizabethtown: The First Three Centuries.'' Elizabethtown, PA: Elizabethtown Historical Society, 1999.</ref>

[[Kreider Shoe Manufacturing Company]] in Elizabethtown was listed on the [[National Register of Historic Places]] in 1980.<ref name="nris">{{NRISref|version=2010a}}</ref>