There is a low white building on Route 106 in Jericho that most drivers pass without registering, right up until the first cold snap in September, when a line forms out the door and stays there until Christmas. Jericho Cider Mill has been selling cider on Long Island since the 1820s, which makes it older than the Long Island Rail Road, older than Nassau County as a legal entity, and by its own account the oldest cider mill in New York State.

It has moved twice, been shut down by the federal government once, and passed through four generations of the same family. It is still open seven days a week.

The original mill

The first Jericho mill went up in the early 1800s, about half a mile north of Jericho Turnpike on what is now Route 106. It was a three-story wooden barn on a rock and brick foundation, and it made its name on champagne cider, worked with steam-powered equipment and hand-operated screw presses, and aged in underground cellars.

That is a scale of operation worth pausing on. Cider in the 1800s was not a seasonal novelty. It was the default drink across much of the Northeast, safer than most available water and cheaper than beer, and a mill of that size was a piece of agricultural infrastructure rather than a roadside attraction.

Prohibition closed it, and a farmer reopened it

The mill stopped in 1919, when Prohibition arrived and the market for hard cider disappeared overnight. That should have been the end of it.

Instead a Jericho farmer named John Hicks opened a mill roughly 1,000 feet further south along Route 106, producing vinegar and sweet cider, both of which were legal, and kept it running until his death in the 1930s. The business survived by making the version of its product that the law still allowed.

It was bought from Hicks's nephew by a farmer named John Zulkofske, known locally as Farmer John. His son George eventually took over and installed a German-made Willmes air press, a piece of equipment that squeezes the fruit with an inflating bladder rather than crushing it, and which is still the preferred method for growers who care about how the juice tastes.

In 1958 the mill moved a third time, pushed off its site by the widening and straightening of Route 106, and settled at 213 Route 106, where it sits today.

Still a family operation

George's widow Agnes remains involved in the pie side of the business, and his daughter Debbie works the front counter. The Town of Oyster Bay has commemorated the mill with a historical sign, which is a nice gesture and also slightly beside the point: the mill's claim on the town is that it never stopped operating, not that it is remembered.

What they actually make

The mill presses more than 40,000 gallons of cider a year. The apples come from the Hudson Valley, which is worth stating plainly rather than pretending otherwise. Long Island's agricultural strength is potatoes, wine grapes, ducks and sod; the state's apple country is upriver, and it has been for a long time.

The other half of the business is pie. The apple pie recipe dates to around 1968 and is made on site, and for a large share of Nassau County households the Jericho pie is the Thanksgiving pie, ordered ahead and picked up in a hurry on a Wednesday afternoon.

What you will not find is hard cider. The mill's product is fresh, sweet, unfermented cider, the kind that goes cloudy in the jug and needs refrigerating, which is a different drink entirely from what it was famous for two hundred years ago.

If you are going

Jericho Cider Mill
213 Route 106, Jericho, NY 11753
Open daily, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
(516) 433-3360

The season runs from late summer through the holidays, and the crowds track the weather almost exactly. The first genuinely cold Saturday in October is the worst possible time to arrive and also, in fairness, the entire point. Weekday mornings are the move if you want to actually park.

Long Island has lost most of its working agricultural landmarks in Nassau County. Broad Hollow is office parks, the Hicksville farms are subdivisions, and the potato fields moved steadily east until they ran out of island. A cider mill on Route 106 that has been pressing apples through Prohibition, three locations and four generations is not a museum piece. It is one of the last pieces of the old Nassau still doing the thing it was built to do.