Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Elizabethtown, PA

Elizabethtown is a borough in northwestern Lancaster County, about 20 miles southeast of Harrisburg and 20 miles northwest of the city of Lancaster.

Elizabethtown traces its founding to 1753, when Captain Barnabas Hughes acquired land, laid out a town, and named it for his wife, Elizabeth — the officially accepted account of the town's name.

Elizabethtown was incorporated as a borough on April 13, 1827, and a railroad was built through the area in the 1830s; it remains a stop on Amtrak's Keystone line between Harrisburg and Philadelphia.

Elizabethtown is known throughout south-central Pennsylvania by the nickname 'E-Town,' a name also used by its college and its high school.

The 2020 census counted 11,639 people in Elizabethtown, and Census Bureau figures put the borough at roughly 4,590 households, averaging about 2.2 people each.

Elizabethtown stayed mainly agricultural until the early 1900s, when the Klein Chocolate Company (later part of Mars, Inc.) and several shoe factories opened; a large Mars Chocolate North America plant still operates in the borough.

Elizabethtown College was founded in 1899 by members of the Church of the Brethren and is a private liberal arts college known in part for its center dedicated to the study of Plain (Amish and related) communities in America.

The Masonic Homes — now the Masonic Village retirement community — opened in Elizabethtown in 1910 and remains one of the borough's landmark institutions.

After World War II, Elizabethtown grew rapidly, more than doubling its population between 1950 and 2000.

The Winters Heritage House Museum preserves Elizabethtown's earliest buildings, including three original log structures dating from 1750 to 1847 and a brick house from 1877.