Walk from the Lincoln Avenue trailhead to the far edge of downtown Export and you will not break a sweat. The whole borough covers four-tenths of a square mile, small enough that a slow stroller push covers it end to end before a coffee goes cold. For most of the year, that smallness is just a fact locals mention in passing. Today it is the whole point.
The Export Ethnic Food and Music Festival runs from noon to 9 p.m. today in Historic Downtown Export, free to walk in, two stages of live music, and a stretch of local food, drink, and craft vendors packed into a business district you could circle on foot in the time it takes to park. The Export Historical Society has run this one every third Saturday of August since 2016, and the borough treats it less like an event and more like an annual proof of concept: that a town this size can still fill a whole day.
But the festival itself is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what happens after 9 p.m., which is a question this same two-block stretch could not have answered a couple of years ago.
A Borough You Can Walk in Under Ten Minutes
Export is not a neighborhood inside Murrysville. It is its own municipality, incorporated in 1911 when it split off from what was then Franklin Township and is now the Municipality of Murrysville, and it sits entirely surrounded by Murrysville on every side. That geography confuses people who assume it is a subdivision or a business strip. It is a full borough with its own mayor, council, and civic identity, just one that happens to fit inside four-tenths of a square mile.
That scale is why an event like today's festival can feel like it takes over the whole place. There is no version of downtown Export large enough to absorb a crowd quietly. Everyone walking to the music stages passes the same corners, the same storefronts, the same trailhead. The compression is the charm.
The Trail That Used to Just End
Downtown Export sits on top of what was once the Turtle Creek Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a line chartered in 1886 by George Westinghouse Jr. to connect Saltsburg and Export.
The rail line that once shipped coal and freight through this valley is now the Westmoreland Heritage Trail, a crushed-limestone path that the Westmoreland County parks department manages along with the trail's volunteer chapter.
The Export segment runs 9.2 miles from the Lincoln Avenue access point to B-Y Park in Trafford, flat and shaded enough that it draws walkers, joggers, and cyclists on ordinary Saturdays with no festival involved. A restored Pennsylvania Railroad caboose, donated by Dura-Bond Industries and rebuilt by the Export Historical Society, sits along the route as a marker of what this corridor used to move through town before it moved people instead.
For years, that Lincoln Avenue access point functioned exactly the way a trailhead usually does. You parked, you walked or rode, you turned around, you left. The trail was a destination in itself, not a route to anywhere else downtown.
What Opened at the Corner of Lincoln and Washington
That changed with Masters Trailside Tavern, a restaurant that took over the building at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Washington Avenue, a structure the owners describe as a focal point of the borough since the 1800s. The interior leans into that history on purpose, built with refurbished wood and recycled materials pulled from the original coal-mining-era structure, industrial in a way that reads as intentional rather than trendy.
It shares ownership with Jigger's Pub, the longtime downtown bar known locally for its wings, and it added something Jigger's never offered: a scratch kitchen, an espresso bar pulling shots of Pittsburgh's La Prima coffee, and a cocktail list built for people staying past dinner rather than stopping in for a quick pour.
The name is not incidental. Trailside Tavern sits close enough to the Lincoln Avenue access point that a walk on the Westmoreland Heritage Trail can now end with a seat at a bar instead of a walk back to a parked car. That is a small change on paper. In a borough this size, it rewires the whole evening. The trailhead stopped being a dead end and started being the first stop in a night out.
Wade's Breakfast and Grille handles the other end of the day for the same corridor, a diner-style breakfast spot locals point to for fast service and reliable plates before a festival morning or a trail walk. Between Wade's in the morning, the trail through the middle of the day, and Masters Trailside Tavern or Jigger's after dark, downtown Export now covers a full day without anyone needing to leave a four-block radius.
What's Actually Happening Today
If you are heading down for the festival, here is the shape of the day as it stands:
- Noon to 9 p.m.: Free admission, two music stages, food and craft vendors, and a children's play area, all within downtown Export.
- Wade's Breakfast and Grille: A reliable stop before the festival gets going, if you want to eat before the crowds settle in.
- Masters Trailside Tavern: Open Thursday through Sunday evenings, roughly 4 p.m. onward, the natural place to end the night after the last band finishes.
- Jigger's Pub: The neighborhood standby if you want something more casual, wings included.
- The Westmoreland Heritage Trail: Accessible right off Lincoln Avenue, a quiet walk if you need a break from the crowd or want to see the restored caboose before heading back into the festival.
None of this requires a car once you are parked. That is unusual for a town this size, and it is worth noticing precisely because it was not always true.
Ten Years Under One Committee
The festival itself traces back to Export's 2011 centennial, a year of planning that ended in a downtown celebration substantial enough to earn the Arthur St. Clair Award for Historical Preservation from the Westmoreland County Historical Society. The committee behind that celebration did not disband afterward. It became the Export Historical Society, and under Melanie Litz's leadership the group has run the ethnic food and music festival every August since 2016, alongside smaller efforts like a free spring program on the history of the old Turtle Creek Valley Railroad line that became today's trail.
That continuity matters more than it sounds like it should. A festival that survives ten summers in a borough this small is not coasting on novelty. It persists because the same handful of people keep showing up to organize it, year after year, in a town where organizing anything means coordinating with almost everyone who lives there.
The Same Two Blocks, a Longer Day
None of this required new construction or an expanded footprint. Export did not get bigger. It got a second restaurant with different hours than the one it already had, in a building that had been sitting on a well-placed corner the whole time. That is the actual shift worth understanding about a Saturday like today: the festival draws the crowd, but the reason people can stay past dark now, instead of packing up when the music stops, is a kitchen and a bar that opened at exactly the point where the trail meets the business district.
Small places change in small increments. A four-tenths-of-a-square-mile borough does not need a new development to feel different. It needs one corner building to start staying open past sunset, and suddenly the whole evening has somewhere to go.
If you already call Export or the rest of Franklin Regional School District home, none of this needs to send you anywhere. It is just what today looks like, and worth knowing why it looks different than it did a couple of summers ago. If you are watching this corner of Westmoreland County from the outside and wondering what daily life actually feels like here, the Harmotto Team spends its time in towns exactly like this one and is always glad to talk through what a neighborhood is really like to live in, not just what it costs.
