Permanent Holiday
Lighting in
Cranberry Township, PA

Cranberry Township was settled in 1796 by the brothers Mathew and William Graham and incorporated in 1804. The name comes from the wild cranberries that were abundant along the banks of Brush Creek before the twentieth century. None of that is what shapes a lighting decision here.

The population is: 14,816 at the 1990 census, 23,625 in 2000, 28,098 in 2010 and 33,087 as of the 2020 census. The township more than doubled in thirty years.

That growth curve means the housing stock is overwhelmingly recent. Before the Second World War, Cranberry Township was primarily an agricultural community without a traditional downtown, and the acceleration came after the Pennsylvania Turnpike was completed in 1951 and Interstate 79 opened in 1966. For a system mounted on the fascia, recent construction is close to ideal.

Modern residential building means straight aluminum fascia board, consistent trim colors chosen from a builder's palette, generous soffit depth and roof planes that meet at predictable angles. There is very little ornament to work around and very little variation from one elevation to the next.

The flip side is that new construction is unforgiving. On an 1880s house with a bracketed cornice, a channel that wanders a quarter inch over forty feet is invisible because the eye has ornament to look at instead.

On a clean modern fascia there is nothing else in the frame, so the line is either dead level or the house looks slightly wrong and nobody can say why. The substrate is easy and the tolerance is tight, which is an unusual combination.

The subdivision effect is the other thing worth understanding here. In neighborhoods where a run of houses shares a builder and therefore a trim color, a track matched to that color disappears not just on one house but along the whole street. Cranberry has 22.83 square miles of land and a great deal of it was developed in coherent phases, so this is the practical reality on most streets rather than an exception.

It is also why the daytime read is worth settling before the color programming conversation starts. Eleven months of the year, the correct answer is that nobody notices anything.

The township's own calendar supports a system that works past December. Community Days brings live music, a 5K and fireworks, the Town Square Market runs weekly through the summer, and there is a municipal 18-hole golf course at Cranberry Highlands alongside Cranberry Park, North Boundary Park and Graham Park.

A fixed track carries warm white through most of that, two colors for a weekend, and full color for a short stretch in December. A seasonal install does one of those things and sits in a garage for the rest.

One local note. The township added roughly 18,000 residents between 1990 and 2020, and a good deal of that arrived as planned development rather than lot-by-lot building. Whether any approval applies to exterior fixtures at a particular address is worth checking at the start, because it is a five-minute question before an order and a much larger one afterward.