Dutch country: the Smithton Country Inn, which began taking in lodgers in 1763. It was built by Henry and Susana Miller, who were householders of the Ephrata Community, an 18th-century Protestant monastic sect. Stone walls and flower gardens surround the field-stone building on a hill overlooking the Ephrata Cloister. Innkeeper Dorothy Graybill is Pennsylvania Dutch. She bought Smithton in 1979, attentively restored it down to the most minute detail, and reopened it in 1982.
At dusk, lamps are lit in each window. The first floor has a Great Room and ii-brary to the right, and a dining room, where breakfast is served, to the left. Upstairs, guest rooms are individually decorated, but in each you’ll find a work-ing fireplace, antique or handmade reproduction furniture, handmade quilts, reading lamps, stenciling, minirefrigerators, and chamber music. Feather beds are kept in trunks for guests who request them. Flannelnightshirts, coordinated to the color scheme of the room, hang on wooden pegs behind the doors. Many rooms have canopy beds; some have whirlpool baths.
The attached duplex suite has its own entrance. Inside there are a living room, a snack area, a queen-size bed, a twin cupboard bed, and a whirlpool bath. In 1992 Dorothy added a new unit, the Purpie Room, on the second floor facing the back gardens. It includes hand-planed cherry woodwork and floors, an exposed-stone wall, a fireplace, a king-size canopied bed, an all-ceramic bathroom, and a whirlpool.
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