"This is the 18th century," announced Raymond Moore, the proprietor. ''The 19th century starts back by the door." It was unquestionably so. Here at Buffalo Enterprises ("Everything for Period Living") there was no visible reason to doubt that we had changed epochs.
Which was true, in a way, of the whole town of East Berlin. The place feels out of time, not so much for what's there, as for what isn't.
On a long, meandering Saturday drive west through the well-worn Pennsylvania Dutch country, we had passed any number of historic markers, old houses and even whole historic towns. But the "olde-tyme" gift shops and nearby strip developments always lurking on the fringes gave them all a self- consciousness that was lacking here, just over the Adams County line about 12 miles west of York.
It looked, at first, an impossibly dull place to spend a weekend. No nightlife, no trinket trade, not even a postcard to be found. But by poking around, we found some unusual charms, and after awhile, even the dullness of the place (from a tourist's perspective) became part of the attraction. This is the very model of an 18th-century German-immigrant community, the quiet, flat, rectangular kind of place that was eventually duplicated in 10,000 burgs across the United States.
There is one sumptuously Victorian bed-and-breakfast, a functioning general store/soda fountain/drugstore, and a scattering of crafts and antiques shops, but we had to hunt a bit for these. Most of those who do stop for the night at the Leas-Bechtel Mansion Inn are between other destinations or making the antiques circuit. And those who arrive, as we did, late in the day, find they must head back out of town again for dinner; the nearest restaurant with a bar is in Abbottstown, five miles south.
