Wayne County songwriter Richard “Dick” Smith penned the holiday classic from his bed at West Mountain Sanatorium in 1934, drawing on childhood memories of Central Park

HONESDALE, WAYNE COUNTY — Every December, “Winter Wonderland” plays in shopping malls, holiday playlists, and family gatherings across the country. What most people don’t know is that the song was written by a Honesdale native who was dying of tuberculosis in a Scranton hospital, dreaming of the snowy winters he remembered from his Wayne County childhood.

Richard “Dick” Smith was born in Honesdale on September 29, 1901, and grew up at 922 Church Street, directly across from Central Park and the Wayne County Courthouse. He graduated from Honesdale High School in 1920, then headed to Penn State, where he studied advertising, edited the college magazine, and conducted his own orchestra.

By 1934, Smith was 32 years old, confined to a bed at West Mountain Sanatorium in Scranton, and running out of time.

He spent that winter watching snow fall on the hills of Lackawanna County from his hospital window. He thought of home. He remembered Central Park in Honesdale blanketed in white, the neighborhood children building snowmen, the crunch of ice under his boots as a boy.

He couldn’t go outside. The tuberculosis in his lungs wouldn’t allow it. But he could write about it. The result was “Winter Wonderland,” one of the most recorded songs in American history.

From Wayne County to West Mountain

Smith’s path from Honesdale to that Scranton sanatorium wound through New York City. After graduating from Penn State in 1925, he moved to Manhattan to pursue a career in the arts, managing theaters including the Rivoli Theatre in New York and the Fox Palace Northeast in Waterbury, Connecticut. He worked as a newspaper editor. He wrote advertising jingles.

On March 30, 1930, he married Jean Connor, a Scranton native. The couple had barely a year together before tuberculosis changed everything.

Smith was diagnosed in 1931. The disease started in his knee before spreading to his lungs. He was admitted to West Mountain Sanatorium, a sprawling 37-acre treatment facility on the hills above Scranton that had opened in 1904 as the first state-of-the-art tuberculosis center in Pennsylvania.

Jean followed him there, taking a job as a nurse at the same facility so she could be near her husband.

West Mountain had earned a reputation as one of the best TB treatment centers in the nation. The Scranton Society for the Prevention and Cure of Consumption ran the facility, pioneering a then-radical approach that required patients to spend hours outside in the fresh mountain air regardless of the season. Doctors believed the cold, clean air of the Lackawanna County hills could help heal damaged lungs.

For Smith, that meant long hours bundled against the cold, watching snow accumulate on the grounds, his mind drifting back to Honesdale.

A Song Born From Memory

The lyrics Smith wrote at West Mountain weren’t about Scranton. They were about home.

Central Park in Honesdale, a small green space across Church Street from his childhood home, had been his winter playground. The snowman in the song, the one the couple pretends is “Parson Brown,” came from those Wayne County winters. The “walking in a winter wonderland” was the walking Smith could no longer do.

According to his widow, Smith gazed out at children playing in the snow from his sanatorium window and began writing, channeling memories of carefree days in Honesdale into verses about romance and winter joy.

He wasn’t writing a Christmas song. The lyrics never mention Christmas, or any holiday at all. He was writing about winter itself, about snow, about the simple pleasure of being outside in the cold with someone you love.

It was an escape from the reality of his hospital bed.

From a Penciled Manuscript to the Billboard Charts

Smith took his finished lyrics to Felix Bernard, a Brooklyn-born composer who had found success with the 1919 hit “Dardanella.” Bernard set Smith’s nostalgic words to a melody that bounced along like sleigh bells.

The song might have disappeared into obscurity if not for Bernie Smith, Dick’s brother, who lived in New York City. Bernie showed the song to a neighbor named Joey Nash, the vocalist for Richard Himber’s popular Ritz-Carlton Orchestra.

Nash later recalled seeing “a penciled manuscript and a wheezy, home-made recording” of the song. He was captivated by what he called its “unique, sleigh bells-snowman romantic lyrics and its lovely melody.”

On October 23, 1934, Himber’s orchestra recorded “Winter Wonderland” for RCA Victor. The session ran long due to technical difficulties, and the song was nearly scrapped. Nash convinced his fellow musicians to stay for one more take, on the condition that they would only do it once.

That single take became the first recording of “Winter Wonderland.”

The next day, bandleader Guy Lombardo recorded his own version for Decca after hearing Nash perform the song on Himber’s radio broadcasts. Lombardo’s recording climbed to number two on the Billboard charts by December 1934, staying there for nine weeks.

Dick Smith, still at West Mountain Sanatorium, lived to see his song become a hit.

A Life Cut Short

Smith never made it to his 34th birthday.

Hollywood had come calling. The success of “Winter Wonderland” and his other songs attracted interest from film studios, and Smith signed a contract to write music for movies. He was scheduled to leave for California.

He never made it. On September 28, 1935, one day before his 34th birthday, Richard “Dick” Smith died at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, where he had been transferred as his condition worsened.

He was buried at Glen Dyberry Cemetery in Honesdale, back in Wayne County where it all began. His grave marker commemorates him as the author of “Winter Wonderland” and features a small drawing of a snowman.

A Legacy in Song

In the nine decades since Smith’s death, “Winter Wonderland” has been recorded by more than 200 artists, including Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, the Andrews Sisters, Darlene Love, and Michael Bublé. In 2007, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers named it the most-played holiday song of the previous five years.

A 1947 revision added a “children’s lyric” that changed Parson Brown to a “circus clown,” making the song more kid-friendly. Some versions, like Johnny Mathis’s 1958 recording, combine both sets of lyrics.

The phrase “winter wonderland” itself has entered common usage to describe any beautiful snowy scene.

In 2021, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission installed a historical marker at 922 Church Street in Honesdale, across from the Central Park that inspired Smith’s most famous work. The marker notes that Smith wrote the song “while being treated for tuberculosis in Scranton” and that he “passed away from TB shortly after the song was released.”

West Mountain Sanatorium closed in 1974 and sat abandoned for decades, attracting urban explorers and paranormal investigators drawn by rumors of ghosts. The 37-acre property changed hands several times before being purchased at auction in 2018. The ruins of the facility where Smith wrote America’s most beloved winter song still stand on North Sekol Avenue in Scranton, overlooking the valley.

This Christmas, when you hear “Winter Wonderland” playing in a store or on the radio, think of the Wayne County native who wrote it. Think of Dick Smith, far from home, watching snow fall on the hills of Lackawanna County, remembering the winters of his Honesdale childhood, and turning that memory into a song that has outlived him by nearly a century.

Related: Historical Marker Database: Winter Wonderland

Case Reference: Pennsylvania Historical Marker, Honesdale, Wayne County, erected 2021