Cold lunches

[GwendolynnPhillips]

RE: Lebanon Bologna

In addition to Stephanie's reference from York, Lebanon bologna is just a name for a local, European style smoked sausage.  The oldest company still in business opened its doors in 1885 (Weaver's); however, that is just larger scale meat smokers.  A very primiliminary search seems to indicate that it wasn't known as "Lebanon Bologna" until Seltzer's opened their factory in 1902 and started selling it on a grander scale.  Mr. Seltzer apparently wanted to pay homage to his hometown of Palmyra.   So, it very well may have been around locally, but would not have been called as such (probably either just smoked bologna or smoked sausage), which makes it harder to research, unless you have the sausage recipes to go off of.

Short answer, not entirely sure, but likely.  It does seem to be a regional thing, however.  I'm not sure how likely it would be for anyone outside this region to have it, unless it had conceivably been sent by family in a care package (Companies of the 79th and 77th PA were based out of Lancaster and fought in the Western campaign in TN, for example, but you wouldn't see a family from TN serving it for lunch).

Kind regards from PA Dutch Country,
Gwendolynn