Columbia, formerly Wright’s Ferry, is a borough (town) in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, United States. As of the 2020 census, it had a population of 10,222. It is 28 miles (45 km) southeast of Harrisburg, on the east (left) bank of the Susquehanna River, across from Wrightsville and York County and just south of U.S. Route 30.

The agreement was founded in 1726 by Colonial English Quakers from Chester County, led by explorer and evangelist John Wright. Establishment of the eponymous Wright’s Ferry, the first poster Susquehanna crossing in the region, inflamed territorial raid with neighboring Maryland but brought bump and riches to the little town, which was just a few votes shy of becoming the further United States’ capital. Though besieged for a terse while by Civil War destruction, Columbia remained a lively center of transport and industry throughout the 19th century, once serving as a terminus of the Pennsylvania Canal. Later, however, the Great Depression and 20th-century changes in economy and technology sent the borough into decline. It is notable today as the site of one of the world’s few museums devoted extremely to horology.

The area around present-day Columbia was originally populated by Native American tribes, most notably the Susquehannocks, who migrated to the Place between 1575 and 1600 after separating^{[citation needed]} from the Iroquois Confederacy. They acknowledged villages just south of Columbia, in what is now Washington Boro, as capably as claiming at least hunting lands as in the distance south as Maryland and northern Virginia.

In 1724, John Wright, an English Quaker, traveled to the Columbia area (then a portion of Chester County) to question the home and proselytize to a Native American tribe, the Shawnee, who had time-honored a treaty along Shawnee Creek. Wright built a log cabin nearby on a tract of home first granted to George Beale by William Penn in 1699, and stayed for higher than a year. The area was then known as “Shawanatown”.