Elizabethtown: The road to E-Town

At least since 1901, E-Town has been shorthand for Elizabethtown.

In March 1901, the weekly Lancaster Inquirer newspaper featured a fascinating list of tidbits.

They were on page four, column five, under the heading “Just a few lines” and ranged from prosaic to profound.

“Robins are here once more,” read the first one. Another mentioned a West Donegal man who had sold $7.50 worth of skunk furs during the winter. (That’s nearly $300 worth of skunk furs in today’s dollars.)

Others hinted at a county on the cusp of modernization: A trolley line coming to Mount Joy, a shoe factory opening in Elizabethtown.

And then a seemingly throwaway line: “Elizabethtown, in order to save labor, should be written ‘E’town.’ ”

The shoe factories are long gone in Elizabethtown, but the abbreviation, in multiple forms, is still with us more than 125 years later.

More than just shorthand, E-Town (our preferred version) is part of the local vernacular — and a hallmark of the borough’s identity.

The earliest reference we found, in the Lancaster Inquirer in 1901.

In sports pages

Say "E-Town" almost anywhere in central Pennsylvania, and most people know you're talking about Elizabethtown. When Stay moved to the borough in June 2026, we introduced “Ooh! Aah! E-Town"!” and “Vitamin E-Town” tee designs.

But I wondered how the nickname originated, how it evolved, and why it survived.

What I discovered is that the vast majority of early usages occurred on sports pages, which were known to use shorthand and nicknames liberally. The abbreviations varied from an apostrophe to a hyphen to no punctuation at all.

And in an age of hand-set metal type, an abbreviation could cut “Elizabethtown” from 13 characters to less than half that. It required less labor and consumed less column space.

In 1912, Lancaster New Era stories about the county baseball championship used “Etown” in quotes, perhaps suggesting that the term was still a bit of a novelty.

I kept going back in time, finding a June 26, 1911 story about a baseball game. “New Holland was jubilant over its victory over E-town,” it read.

And then I stumbled upon the 1901 list in the Inquirer.

It could be the oldest documented reference to abbreviating Elizabethtown’s name. It’s the earliest I found in a fairly exhaustive search of the newspapers.com database.

From a baseball story in the Lancaster New Era, June 26, 1911.

Whenever it began, it seems to have been an organic process, particularly given the various forms of the abbreviation.

The Elizabethtown Chronicle, a weekly newspaper, was using “E-town” as early as 1928. (The Chronicle’s archive on newspapers.com runs from 1928 to 1977.) Lancaster’s Sunday News used “E-Town” in 1937, as did the Ephrata Review in 1957, based on my research.

‘Etown’ for the college

By 1950, the abbreviation had spread beyond sports, into classified listings such as one from the seller of a Winchester rifle who shared his “E-town” address. A 1952 news headline read: “E-town Lions Club Observes Holy Week.” The abbreviation appeared in a display ad for a real estate open house in 1977.

While the Chronicle referred to “E-town College” as early as 1945, the college’s preferred style is “Etown,” with no hyphen.

“Please note: E-town, ETown, and E’town, are never acceptable uses,” according to the college’s brand guide.

Why did E-Town survive when so many newspaper abbreviations disappeared? We can't know for certain.

Consider the fate of "Penna.," which gradually disappeared as a common abbreviation for Pennsylvania after ZIP codes standardized two-letter state abbreviations in 1963.

In 1911, the Masonic Homes were under construction in Elizabethtown. Against that backdrop, the Lancaster Inquirer reported that “the Elizabethtown shoe factory” had shipped 60,000 pairs of shoes in a two-week period.

The headline: “Masonichomeville’s a shoe town.”

Fortunately, that nickname didn’t catch on. Neither did “M-Town” for Middletown, eight miles west of E-Town, although it appeared in the occasional newspaper headline.

More than 125 years after one newspaper wag suggested shortening Elizabethtown "to save labor," E-Town remains woven into the borough's identity.

That shoe factory came and, long ago, went away.

E-Town is still on the job.