It's gray and drizzling late on a Thursday afternoon as I pull into one of the parking places behind the garden of The Chancellor's House in Bedford. I'm here on a mission: get to know the town some of my ancestors called home 200 years ago and learn more about the lives they lived there.

Lynn George welcomes me out of the rain and into the kitchen of the 1870s Italianate building that University of Pittsburgh chancellor John Bowman purchased as a second home around 1950. Lynn, a theater professional, and her husband, Steve, director of Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority from 1973 to 1982, bought it as a retirement home and potential bed and breakfast in 1991 and opened for business in 2002.

It has been about 15 years since I've been to Bedford and I don't recall nearly as much retail vitality then as there is today, helped along partly, Steve says, by the reopening last year of the Bedford Springs Resort and its spa, golf course and restaurants. Antiques shops, upscale clothing stores, an Italian specialty foods store and other boutiques and eateries give Bedford the air of a small resort town.

Located about two hours east of Pittsburgh, Bedford has a Main Street -- Pitt Street -- that rises and falls and bends, and along it is a procession of well-maintained historic buildings dating at least to 1758, when John Fraser and his wife opened their stone inn and trading post. Eight years later, John Lukens, the state's surveyor general, laid out the town for William Penn's son, Gov. John Penn, who instructed him to include a town square in the most convenient place, which, as it turned out, wasn't along the main street.

Because of the lay of the land, then, Bedford is both a string town, with houses and shops strung along Pitt Street, and a town-square town, with the square lying two blocks south of Pitt. Four quarter-block squares form a public park bisected by Penn and Juliana streets; on one of the squares sits the county courthouse, a Greek Revival building of 1829. One block north of Pitt Street flows the beautiful, placid Juniata River.

It seems to have been Lukens' idea to name the streets for the Penns: John, his siblings Richard and Thomas, and Thomas' wife Juliana (there's also a Penn Street).

Anchored in New World antiquity, tourism is the town's future; the Bedford County Visitors Bureau operates a spacious welcome center at 131 S. Juliana St., where I picked up an excellent walking tour brochure written and designed by bureau director Dennis Tice.

I can't think of another small town in Western Pennsylvania that has as impressive a collection of buildings representing as wide a range of American styles, from the courthouse and the Federal-style Anderson House of 1815 -- now housing the arts center and chamber of commerce -- to the Gothic Revival St. James Episcopal Church of 1866 and Dunkle's Art Deco Gulf gas station, attributed to Pittsburgh architect Edward Weber and opened in 1933. Throw in The Coffee Pot and The Igloo, and you have a critical mass of buildings worth going out of your way for.

As Steve waited up for late-arriving guests, we sat in the cherry-paneled library and talked into the night about Bedford and Pittsburgh. Bowman created the library in one of the rooms of the circa 1915 addition, with a fireplace faced in plain tiles that he made in his carriage house, where he maintained a studio, and figured tiles produced by Henry Mercer's Moravian Pottery & Tile Works and given to Bowman by friends. The cherry wood, which also covers the ceiling beams, came from trees on rural land that Bowman owned in Bedford County.

Eight of my ancestors -- mason Samuel Hall, farmer Abraham Bridges, stage driver Thomas Bagley and blacksmith William Cook and their wives -- lived in the county, some of them in a remote, isolated valley south of Bedford called Bean's Cove. Many of the county's sheltered, narrow valleys are called coves, from the Old English cofa, a remnant of early British settlement.

The next morning, after breakfasting on Lynn's sweet-tart lemon-ricotta pancakes, I head for the Bedford County Historical Society, which operates the Pioneer Library in a Colonial Revival building on East John Street. Ray Jackson, a retired physician who moved to Bedford 15 years ago, couldn't have been more helpful to me and a handful of other seekers, retrieving county histories, maps and family histories and offering suggestions for further research. I'd half expected to leave with copies of genealogies traced back to Europe, as I'd done years ago at the Butler library, but none seems to have been written for the lines I'm researching.

On Saturday I found Bridges graves in the Catholic church cemetery in Bean's Cove, where I met up with a friend who was camping nearby; we found more Bridges headstones in the Methodist church graveyard. A book of maps bought the day before at the library revealed a small settlement at Bean's Cove in the 1870s, with a store, gristmill and cluster of homes where now only the Methodist church, one-room schoolhouse and handful of houses stand. It's peaceful in this green valley; the late-August hum of crickets and cicadas is disrupted only by the anachronistic roar of a motorcycle or car. There are Bridges here still, one of them remembered in a roadside memorial between the schoolhouse and the church.

That afternoon we visited the National Museum of the American Coverlet, which opened last year in a historic school across from The Chancellor's House on Juliana Street. In the entrance hall, a map-like mural of the town by Kevin Kutz, Bedford's painter laureate, suggests a scene of a century or two ago. Along with a fine collection of coverlets, there's a large museum shop packed with local books, coverlet-patterned fabrics and new woven coverlets, table runners and napkins, all handmade in eastern Pennsylvania.

Later we ate at Jean Bonnet's Tavern, a stone inn built in the 1760s at the fork in Forbes Road, where two centuries ago, my friend says, travelers heading west made their decision: take the high road that continues to Pittsburgh or the low-lying road to points south.

The high road, later known as the Lincoln Highway and Route 30, also led, then as now, through Bedford, which has held on to its history and where, I learned by looking at another 1870s map, William Cook, my great-great-great-grandfather, had his blacksmith shop at the bend in West Pitt Street, on the same lot where Dunkle's Gulf station stands today.

I'd spent only a few days in Bedford, but left feeling like a native.