Shirley township

Beacon Lodge: A Mount Union Address in Another County

The Pennsylvania Lions Beacon Lodge Camp posts its letters to Mount Union, and nearly everyone here would tell you it is ours. It is not, quite. The camp describes itself as “a beautiful five hundred and eighty-three acre summer camp for children and adults with special needs including blindness, deafness, and many other physical and mental challenges,” set “along the Juniata River of Central Pennsylvania just two miles west of Newton Hamilton, near Mount Union.” It was established in 1948 as a summer camp for blind residents of Pennsylvania.

Its buildings stand in Wayne township, Mifflin County. What does run into this county is the road named after it: Beacon Lodge Road crosses the line and carries on west through Shirley township for most of its length. A postal address is not a county boundary, which is worth remembering every time one of these is filed.

What the fact check changed. The camp's description and its 1948 founding are quoted from its own website as archived in August 2019. The county was checked twice and independently, because the postal address says Mount Union: the Census address geocoder places 114 State Route 103 in Mifflin County, Wayne township, and OpenStreetMap's node for the camp at 40.374, -77.813 geocodes to the same place. The segments of Beacon Lodge Road at 40.365, -77.849 and westward geocode to Huntingdon County, Shirley township. ⚠ The camp's own domain has lapsed since June 2025; nothing here is claimed about whether it still operates, because an expired domain is evidence about a domain.

Sources

Checked 2026-09-01 · Archived primary source

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