Ask anyone in Inman about the Saluda Grade Trail and you'll get an earful about waterfalls, Zirconia, and a 31.5-mile ribbon of pavement that's supposed to change everything. What you won't hear as often is that the trail hasn't broken ground yet. The land closed in the summer of 2025. The design work is still underway in 2026. And somehow, downtown Inman already has more places to eat, drink, and gather on a Saturday than it's had in decades.
That's the part worth sitting with. The businesses didn't wait for the infrastructure. They bet on the promise of it, one storefront at a time, and the bet is already paying off in a fall calendar that's fuller than anything the town has seen.
The Town That Went Without Restaurants
Downtown Inman used to be a place you drove through, not to. For years, downtown had no restaurants. Now there are three, including The Crepe Factory, which moved to Inman from downtown Spartanburg in 2021. Sandy Green has watched the whole shift from behind the counter at Gifts For All Seasons, where she's sold cards and keepsakes on North Main Street for three decades. Her read on what changed the town's fortunes is blunt.
"What has really helped us is getting new restaurants," Green said.
Denise Mehl, who owns The Crepe Factory, put it almost the same way when foot traffic started climbing.
"We are on the edge of a revitalization"
Neither owner was talking about a trail that already existed. They were talking about one that was still years from construction.
Four Restaurants, One Bet
Line up the openings and the pattern is hard to miss. Each new business cited the same not-yet-built amenity as a reason to plant a flag downtown.
- 2021 — The Crepe Factory relocates from downtown Spartanburg to 12 S. Main St.
- October 2023 — Jim and Carin Holliday build their new Holliday Brewing manufacturing and distribution facility in downtown Inman, a custom-built 9,000-square-foot brewery and taproom located at 12 Prospect St., a block north of Main Street. Jim Holliday said Inman offered the right opportunity at the right time for his company's expansion, and the planned trail promises to make that future even brighter.
- February 2025 — Dutton's Family Restaurant opens in a building formerly occupied by Big Daddy's Drive-in at 11030 Asheville Highway. Big Daddy's closed in 2023 after a nearly 30-year run. Development of the Saluda Rail Trail was also a factor in owner Jackie Dutton's decision to open her business.
- Recently — El Conquistador Mexican opens its newest location, an authentic Mexican dining experience joining two other locations. Grand opening celebrations just wrapped.
Four openings since 2021, in a town that had gone years without a sit-down restaurant, all placing the same wager on a trail that's still on paper.
What The Trail Actually Looks Like Right Now
Here's where the timeline gets interesting. The Saluda Grade Trails Conservancy officially purchased the corridor in the summer of 2025. This once-in-a-generation project is moving into the design phase, with more than 15 miles of trail set to connect Inman to the state line. Moving into design is not the same as breaking ground. There's no construction start date on the Saluda Grade Trail's own site, only a description of a planning process that gathered input from more than a thousand people along the corridor.
The Saluda Grade Trail Guiding Plans, developed in 2026, are the result of a yearlong community engagement process shaped by more than 1,200 residents, business owners, and community leaders along the corridor. There's also a separate connector study, completed in 2025, identifying potential alignments from the trail's southern terminus in Inman to the Daniel Morgan trail system in Spartanburg. Both are planning documents. Neither is pavement.
So the restaurants that named the trail as a reason to open didn't open next to a finished amenity. They opened next to a construction plan. That's a different kind of local knowledge than "a new trail is coming." It's proof that Inman's downtown economy is already strong enough to run ahead of its own infrastructure.
The Fullest Fall Inman's Had
Whatever is driving it, the calendar backs it up. Harvest Day 2026 will have more than 200 street vendors, including 25 food vendors, and more than 30 downtown Inman businesses open for visitors, making the 45th Harvest Day the biggest one yet. The one-day festival draws nearly 20,000 visitors each year. Against a town that counted about 3,500 residents as of 2024, that's a crowd more than five times the size of Inman itself, arriving for a single Saturday.
Here's what's actually on the calendar this fall:
| Date | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 29, 2026 | Lakeside Cars & Coffee | Bowen's Landing |
| Sept 26, 2026 | Harvest Day 5K, 8–10 a.m. | Inman Fire Dept., 6 N Humphrey St |
| Sept 26, 2026 | Harvest Day (45th annual) | Downtown Inman |
| Oct 18, 2026 | Market on Mill | Mill Street |
| This fall (date TBA) | Cartoberfest, classic cars and food trucks | Downtown Inman |
| This fall (date TBA) | Music on Mill: Fall Edition, featuring The Piedmont Boys | Mill Street |
| This fall (date TBA) | Boo on Mill, costume contest and trick-or-treating | Downtown Inman |
The 5K start line sits at the Inman Fire Department on North Humphrey Street, and it's built as a run through downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods, meant to kick off the Harvest Day celebration before the festival crowds arrive.
This year, downtown hosted its first-ever National Night Out, a fun evening bringing the community together with local first responders, complete with family-friendly activities and food. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of event a town only adds to its calendar once it has enough foot traffic downtown to justify it.
Where To Actually Eat This Weekend
If you're deciding where to land on a Wednesday or a Sunday, the routine downtown has settled into looks like this. Holliday Brewing runs a Wednesday happy hour from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., a season that runs through October before picking back up each May, followed by Wednesday cornhole nights from 7 to 10 p.m. Their Sunday brunch runs from noon to 3 p.m., with mimosas alongside the regular menu. Cafe on Main and Old Town Pizza both show up consistently on local best-of lists for lunch and casual dinner, and The Crepe Factory is still serving out of its original spot on South Main, five years after the move from Spartanburg.
None of this required the trail to finish. It required people willing to open a business on the strength of what Inman was becoming, not what it already was.
The Part That's Easy To Miss
The economic impact studies and grant applications for the Saluda Grade Trail are still being written. Downtown Inman's answer to the question of whether the town could support new restaurants, a fuller event calendar, and a 45-year-old festival that's somehow still growing has already been given, by the people who opened the doors.
If you're a longtime Inman resident, none of this changes your weekend plans by much, other than giving you a reason to try El Conquistador before the trail crowds discover it too. But if you've ever wondered what all this downtown momentum might mean for what your own home is worth, that's a conversation Team Inglee has with Inman neighbors regularly. Request Your Free Home Valuation whenever you're curious, no trail required.
