If you live in Inwood, look at where your last three Saturdays actually landed. Odds are at least one of them ended at 178 Pilgrim Street, whether you were grabbing a Cider Press burger, picking up local eggs, or cutting through the market on the way home from an errand off Route 11. That address does more quiet organizing of daily life here than any single street corner in Martinsburg does for its own residents.
The reason is older than most of the houses in South Berkeley. The same parcel has been the town's food anchor, in one form or another, for more than a hundred years. Understanding that is the difference between treating Inwood like a bedroom community off I-81 and reading it as a place with a working center of gravity you can actually plan around.
The parcel that keeps reorganizing itself
The site now known as Taylor's Farm Market has been in the food business since the 1920s. The location was originally developed into the Demonstration Community Apple Packing School in 1920, where many apple producers came to learn best practices for packing fruit via 12 orchards that sent 120,000 barrels of apples there, and where fruit was also inspected and graded before shipping on the Cumberland Valley Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The C.H. Musselman Company of Biglerville, Pennsylvania opened an apple processing plant at Inwood in 1920, and by the late 1920s the Musselman plant exclusively produced apple sauce, the first apple processing plant of its kind.
Then it burned. On a cold January evening in 1955, the building ignited in what was then believed to be the biggest rural fire in the county's history, and in time the facility was rebuilt and later became the Inwood Farmer's Market operated by the West Virginia Department of Agriculture. In 2014, Robert and Ryan Taylor took over operation of the farm market, bringing their locally picked fruits direct to the community, farming over 1,350 acres of row crops, orchards and vegetable gardens.
That's the parcel. Packing school, applesauce pioneer, county farmers market, family-run market and restaurant. Same ground, four working lives, one continuous idea.
What's actually inside the building this month
The market itself is the produce-and-provisions side. The Taylors farm over 1,350 acres of row crops and orchards, and the operation produces over 130,000 bushels of apples plus 5,000 bushels of peaches, cherries, plums, and nectarines that are sold in the farm market along with a huge variety of other local produce. Late summer is stone-fruit-into-early-apples territory here. If you have been buying peaches from Food Lion out of habit, taste the difference this month before the window closes.
Attached to the market is the Cider Press Deli & Grill, which opened in 2016 in what had been empty warehouse space. It is worth naming what makes it more than a market cafe:
- Housemade specialties including sandwiches, salads, soups, local hand-pattied burgers, Black Dog coffee, local craft beer and wine, and desserts.
- A menu that leans into the location: bourbon-glaze cedar plank salmon, Cuban and Italian paninis, a Cider Press chili bowl, apple cider slushies, and a signature salad built on apple slices, cranberries, blue cheese, pecans, and an apple cider vinaigrette.
- Recognition as one of the top 101 winners in a Mountain State restaurant vote out of thousands of restaurants.
If you have lived here more than a year and still default to a chain off Gerrardstown Road on a Friday night, this is the correction.
The October Saturday you should be putting on the calendar right now
The Taylors host a full-day Fall Harvest Festival every October on the grassy lot across from the market. It is the one day the parcel's whole history is out on display at the same time.
Fall Harvest Festival, Saturday, October 13, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., free admission, rain or shine, with arts and crafts, live music, a Future Farmers carnival, Cider Press BBQ and chili, WV wine tasting from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., pumpkins and carving, fresh apple cider, an antique tractor display, and former Musselman Apple Processing Factory plant tours hosted by Connections Community Church at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
Read that plant-tour line again. Most residents have driven past that building for a decade without ever going inside. Two tours, one Saturday, walking the exact footprint of the plant that invented commercial applesauce. That is the kind of civic detail an out-of-town guide will never surface for you.
Bring cash for the wine tasting pours, park across the street rather than in the market lot itself, and hit the tour at 11 a.m. rather than 2 p.m. if you want to be back for a Musselman football afternoon.
Where Inwood eats when it is not at Cider Press
The temptation with a food-anchor post is to stop after the marquee spot. That would misrepresent how residents actually eat here. A short honest map:
The new diner. A new diner opened in Inwood, called the Inwood Diner but owned by the same people who own the Spring Mills Diner in Martinsburg. It sits on True Apple Way, and the naming is not accidental. If you are one of the households in the newer subdivisions off Gerrardstown Road, this is now your closest homestyle breakfast.
The sports-bar rotation. Applemen Sports Bar on the Musselman side of town is where the high school crowd and their parents converge on football Fridays. Ollie's Sports Bar & Grill South Side on Dellinger Drive is the alternative when Applemen is full. Tiki's Pub & Grub and Gus's Bar & BBQ round out the casual-with-a-menu tier.
The neighborhood staples. Viva Mexico for family Mexican, Jakki's and Jules of Inwood on Gerrardstown Road, Pizza Oven, Oriental Buffet, and Mr. Richards Hot Dogs and Soft Serve for the after-Little-League ice cream stop. Son Of A Cheesecake on Hovatter Drive is the birthday-cake move most newer residents haven't found yet.
The kids' pressure valve. JayDee's Family Fun Center on Henshaw Road is the indoor rainy-Saturday answer, and it sits close enough to Taylor's that you can combine both in one loop.
None of these are ranked. They are simply the working list a longtime resident would actually rattle off, and it is a longer list than the town's population suggests.
The rest of the fall calendar, dated and specific
A few things worth writing into September and October before they fill up:
- 18th Annual Puttin' for Panhandle Mini Golf, Thursday, September 17, 9 a.m., at 2335 Henshaw Road, Inwood.
- Victoria's Race Against Child Abuse, 8th Annual 5K and Kids Run, Saturday, September 19, 8 a.m., at the W. Randy Smith Recreation Center.
- Designer Purse Bingo, Sunday, September 20, 12:30 p.m., at 8539 Winchester Avenue in Inwood.
- Fall Harvest Festival at Taylor's, October, 178 Pilgrim Street.
Add Musselman home football at 126 Excellence Way to any of those weekends and you have a full Saturday without ever getting on I-81.
The stretch outside the food loop
Two more anchors that residents cycle through without thinking of them as attractions:
- Zetts Tri-State Fish Hatchery. A working hatchery east of town that operates as a low-key outing for kids who have exhausted the county library circuit. Bring quarters for the feed dispensers.
- The Randy Smith Rec Center corridor. The rec center, South Berkeley Little League fields, and Waldeck Field sit close enough that a Saturday can start with a game and end at the market without a second car trip.
These are not tourist bullet points. They are the connective tissue that keeps a Saturday in Inwood from feeling like a chore of driving toward Martinsburg or Winchester for something to do.
Reading the pattern
Here is the through-line worth carrying out of this post: the town has a center of gravity, and it is not on the interstate exit or in the newer townhome sections off Gerrardstown Road. It is a hundred-year-old parcel on Pilgrim Street that keeps being rebuilt into the next version of the same idea, which is that local food and local gathering belong on the same lot.
You do not have to have grown up here to plug into that. But you do have to know it exists. The residents who feel most rooted in Inwood, in our experience working with families across South Berkeley, are the ones who treat Taylor's, the Cider Press, and the October festival as a monthly default rather than a once-a-year novelty. Everything else about weekend life here gets easier once that anchor is in your rotation.
If you have been in Inwood less than two years, this is your first assignment. If you have been here longer, treat the plant tour on the October Saturday as the piece of local history you never quite got around to. Either way, the parcel has been waiting on you since 1920.
When your next chapter in Inwood involves a move, a right-sized home, or a first look at what your current property is worth in this market, we would be glad to help you plan it with the same attention to place that this post argues for. Legacy Real Estate Group works with families across Inwood and the Eastern Panhandle every week. Start Building Your Legacy — Get a Free Home Valuation.
