East Hempfield's Best Walk Used to Be a Landfill. Its Busiest Corridor Used to Be a Farm.

At lunchtime on Rohrerstown Road, the drive-thru line at Chipotle backs up past the Firehouse Subs next door, and the Royal Farms across the lot fills with people grabbing gas and a sandwich in the same stop. Panera has its regulars. So does the Metro Diner. This stretch of East Hempfield Township, built out as Lime Spring Square, is the kind of place you drive through on autopilot: recognizable chains, easy parking, in and out in twenty minutes.

A few minutes away, off Good Drive near Marietta Avenue, there's a gravel trail that winds through a wildflower meadow, past a stand of young forest, and along the Little Conestoga Creek. Dog owners bring their dogs to an open, unfenced play area. Strollers roll along level stone-dust paths. Birders come for the wetlands. None of it looks remotely like where you'd expect to find it, because the ground under the Farmingdale Trail used to be a county landfill.

Neither of these places is what it used to be. That's the actual story here, and it's worth understanding both halves of it if you spend any real time in this corner of the township.

A farm that became a corridor that keeps adding tables

Lime Spring Square didn't exist as a shopping center until developers broke ground on it. Before that, the ground it sits on was two working farms, Lime Spring Farm and Outin Tract, totaling 199 acres stretching from Rohrerstown Road to Marietta Avenue. The developer, Lancaster-based Oak Tree Development Group, pitched it as something narrower than a typical shopping center: a stop for people already in motion, not a destination in itself.

"We'll have a local shopping experience here where people can get the things they need."

That was Oak Tree's Mike O'Brien, as quoted by LancasterOnline, describing the concept while the first buildings were still under construction. Burger King opened first, in 2017. Chipotle, Panera, Starbucks, Royal Farms, Firehouse Subs, MOD Pizza, and Metro Diner followed as anchors, and the broader Lime Spring project was planned to eventually include more than 1.1 million square feet of office, medical, industrial, and residential space, including 279 age-restricted residential units. What started as farmland became one of the more consistently trafficked commercial stretches in West Lancaster, and it hasn't stopped changing tenants.

The newest is Freshido Bar & Kitchen, taking over the former Ginger Asian Kitchen space at 320 Rohrerstown Road, across from Stauffers of Kissel Hill. The concept is Asian fusion: pad thai, sushi, rice and noodle dishes, run by Benson Chan and Shawn You, who opened their first restaurant in Harrisburg back in 2017 before expanding the Freshido name into Dauphin County. This location is a step up from most of their other spots. It's set to run roughly 4,000 square feet, with an outdoor patio and seating for up to 120 people, and it will carry a full-service bar with specialty cocktails, a feature only one other Freshido location has, the Linglestown spot that opened in November 2024. The target was an early-summer 2026 opening, which puts this squarely among the newest things to try on a corridor that has been rotating tenants since the day it opened.

None of this is unusual for a retail corridor. Restaurants close, restaurants open, a shopping center fills in over a decade. What's easy to miss, driving past on the way to pick up groceries, is that the entire footprint used to be something completely agricultural, and the churn of restaurants is just the latest layer on top of that.

The trail that used to be a dump

The Farmingdale Trail tells the opposite version of that story. Instead of private development turning open land into commerce, this is public reclamation turning a liability into green space, and it happened quietly enough that plenty of longtime residents still don't know the history.

The Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority spent roughly $150,000 building the trail system on 70 acres that had previously served as a landfill. Funding for the work came largely from waste fees collected during an unrelated project, the relocation of a Norfolk Southern rail yard. The trail opened to the public in 2013, and it has been quietly used, and quietly expanded, ever since. In the years since, additional trails have been added on the north side of the park, extending the system further than its original footprint.

What you actually find on the ground has nothing landfill about it. The trailhead sits off Good Drive at Noel Dorwart Park, and from there the paths split into a few distinct experiences:

• A wetland loop through what functions as a natural water storage and filtration system, supporting a noticeably wider range of birds and wildlife than the surrounding development would suggest
• An unfenced dog play area, open enough that dogs can move freely, with picnic tables and benches nearby for anyone waiting them out
• A woods and creek trail running alongside the Little Conestoga Creek, with a mostly level, hard-packed surface that works for jogging, biking, or a stroller

The whole system runs about three and a half miles total, tucked between neighborhoods and shopping centers most people wouldn't associate with a nature preserve. It's open daily from dawn to dusk, maintained by LCSWMA rather than the township itself, since the land is technically theirs even though the parking and trailhead sit on township-owned ground at Noel Dorwart Park.

Two conversions, a few minutes apart

Put these next to each other and the pattern is hard to miss. On one side of the township, private capital took two farms and built a commercial corridor that has never stopped adding new restaurants, nine years and counting since Burger King's opening. On the other, a public authority took a closed landfill and built a trail system that has quietly grown its own footprint without any fanfare, adding new loops to the north while most of the traffic on Marietta Avenue drives right past the entrance.

Neither transformation announced itself. Nobody eating a burrito at Chipotle is thinking about the farm that used to be under the parking lot. Nobody walking a dog along the Little Conestoga Creek is picturing a dump truck. That's sort of the point. The built version of East Hempfield that residents interact with daily, the lunch spot, the trail loop, the dog park, sits directly on top of land that did something entirely different not that long ago, and the corridor is still changing. Freshido's arrival this year is just the most recent example of a pattern that's been running since Burger King first opened its doors, and the trail extensions to the north of Noel Dorwart Park show the same thing happening on the reclamation side.

If you've lived here a while, both of these are probably part of your routine already. What's easy to lose track of is how recently, and how deliberately, both of them became what they are now.

If you're curious what else has landed on Rohrerstown Road this year, or which loop at Farmingdale is worth walking first, Ian Hey and Associates keeps an eye on changes like these across East Hempfield as part of staying genuinely local. Reach out anytime you want the fuller picture.