Waverly Township's population sits at 504 people as of the most recent estimate, and it has been shrinking by roughly 1.4% a year, according to figures cited on the town's Wikipedia entry. That is a village smaller than most high school graduating classes in Lackawanna County. It is also, as of this year, the place four surrounding counties are looking to for a walking tour program built entirely by volunteers around one nonprofit's back lawn.
That is the part of Waverly's summer that does not show up on the usual list of splash pads and farmers markets. The town runs a full civic and cultural calendar that has nothing to do with its size, and in 2026 that calendar started exporting itself.
The math that doesn't add up
The reason a village of 504 people supports a full-time community center with its own historian, gallery, gym, tennis courts, and thrift shop traces back to money that arrived a century ago and never left. Margaretta E. Belin funded the Waverly Community House as a memorial to her husband, Henry Belin Jr., after his death in 1917, and deeded the building and grounds to the township on June 4, 1920. Around the same period, wealthy families who had been spending summers in Waverly while living the rest of the year in Scranton started staying year-round, and the town settled into its long-running identity as a white-collar bedroom community.
Everyone calls the building "the Comm" now, and it still functions closer to what a town of ten times Waverly's size would build for itself than what a village of 504 needs. That mismatch between population and infrastructure is the reason this summer's calendar reads the way it does.
What's actually on the lawn this week
If you live in Waverly, you already know most of this. The value is in seeing it stacked together.
- Cars & Coffee returns August 16. The Comm runs its car show twice a year, in June and August, on the lawn at 1115 North Abington Road, with a suggested $15 donation. The June 14 edition featured coffee from Zummo's and treats from Weis and Krispy Kreme, and the August date closes out the 2026 season.
- This year's Waverly Wine Fest carried an America250 theme, with Doug Smith's Dixieland Band playing the back lawn.
- Comm Camp wrapped July 31, closing out a six-week run that moved through themed weeks named Outerspace, Olympics, Jurassic Park, Under the Sea Beach Party, Wild Wild West, and finally Summerween.
- The Small Works Gallery opened "A Life in Art" on June 26, a memorial exhibit for the late Robert Stark, who showed work in galleries across New England and New York and whose paintings are held in private and corporate collections in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, France, and China.
- Pickleball and tennis courts have stayed open to the public on the Comm grounds into September in past seasons, and the Upstairs Thrift Shop has kept Wednesday through Friday hours through August before resuming Saturdays in the fall.
None of this is unusual for Waverly. What is unusual is what the Comm's history program did this year.
A walking tour that outgrew its own village
Destination Freedom, the Comm's Underground Railroad walking tour, started as an internal project. Gia Tugend, now the Comm's executive director, began developing it in 2016 using primary and secondary sources, including Waverly native and former Philadelphia Inquirer editor Jim Remsen's 2017 book on the region's role as a haven for people escaping slavery. Guided school tours began in 2017. The route starts at the Comm, circles the building's square, heads north on Abington Road past the homes, schools, and churches tied to the village's 19th-century abolitionists, and ends near Carbondale Road, once home to one of the largest settlements of formerly escaped people in the region, and Hickory Grove Cemetery, which holds a section dedicated to those same settlers' burials, including George Keys, the first formerly enslaved person to fully settle in Waverly.
In March 2022, the National Park Service accepted Destination Freedom into its National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, one of 16 new listings from that round of applications representing 11 states, as reported by the Times Leader. Since 2020, the program has been run day to day by EJ Murphy, a former social studies teacher and 2014 Keystone College graduate, alongside longtime Comm volunteer and board member Adriane Heine, who has spent two decades working on the program and previously wrote a series on Waverly's history for the Abington Journal.
This spring, the program stopped being just Waverly's. The Endless Mountains Heritage Region, which covers Bradford, Sullivan, Susquehanna, and Wyoming counties, partnered with the Comm to bring the same tour model to Towanda, Montrose, Tunkhannock, and the Dennis Farm, starting with free kickoff events in April and May and full guided tours running through the summer, according to the Wyoming County Examiner. A driving tour along the historic Genesee Road, once used by people fleeing north, is planned for Sullivan County in spring 2027.
"We're very excited to partner with the Waverly Community House," said Cain Chamberlin, executive director of the Endless Mountains Heritage Region.
Set that against the population figure from earlier. A village of 504 people built a research-backed history program on volunteer hours and a single grant-funded archive, and four counties decided it was worth replicating rather than building their own from scratch. That is not the usual direction cultural infrastructure flows in this region. Small towns typically borrow programming from Scranton or Wilkes-Barre. Waverly built something Scranton didn't have and handed the model to its neighbors instead.
Where the tour ends and dinner starts
A ninety-minute walking tour or a Sunday morning at Cars & Coffee tends to end the same way in Waverly, which is to say it ends with food close by. Camelot Restaurant & Inn and The Nyx both show up repeatedly among the area's outdoor-seating spots, the kind of places where a car show crowd or a tour group naturally lands afterward. Glenburn Grill & Bakery, just over the township line, comes up the same way. Closer to the village center, Waverly Deli, on Clinton, runs a straightforward counter operation with porch seating, the sort of place you stop for a sandwich on the way back from the cemetery stop on the tour rather than plan a night around.
None of these are destination restaurants pulling people in from outside the region. They are the places that make a Saturday in Waverly feel finished, which is a different kind of value than a tasting menu, and it is the value that actually shows up in daily life here.
What this actually says about the place
The population number is real, and it is not turning around. What it obscures is that Waverly's civic output per resident is unusually high, and this year that output started flowing outward instead of just filling the Comm's own calendar. If you already live here, that is probably not news to you in the specific sense. What might be new is seeing the shape of it: a hundred-year-old building funded by one family's grief, a walking tour built by a handful of volunteers, and a four-county partnership that exists because the model worked well enough to copy.
If you know someone who has been circling Waverly on a map, wondering whether a town this small can actually support the kind of life they want, this is the kind of detail that answers it better than a listing sheet does. Luxe Homes Real Estate works across Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, including Waverly, and we're glad to talk through what a move here actually looks like, from school district to closing table. Reach out to schedule a conversation whenever you're ready.
