Mickman Brothers’ first location was on the farmstead my wife
and I purchased in April of 1977. Directly across the street from Majestic
Oak’s entrance, sat our little plot of 4 acres with a little grey farmhouse and
an antique red barn. The frame for this barn is of hand-hewn beams held
together with wooden pegs. I planted a neat little 28 tree apple orchard just
east of our driveway and my children and I spent many warm summer days watching
all the apples mature; then we ate ‘em! The house and barn still stand,
although the orchard has fallen on troubled times.
Mickman Brothers’ operated from our little farmstead for
10 years. By the end of 1986, we were bursting at the seams on this little plot
of land; it was time to make a move.
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| Recently renovated Caboose 2013 |
So, after the 1986 Season, brother Chris started
searching for a new site for our growing business. Chris is very good at many
things, and he excels at finding just the right thing when we need a ‘good
deal’. One wintery day he burst into the office and announced that he had
located a 21 acre parcel of commercial property right on Hwy 65 at the corner
of Andover Blvd. “And for a great price too!”, he exclaimed.
We jumped into his pickup truck and drove two miles to
examine the site. It was flat as a board with a little hump on one end, onto
which someone long before had built a little house. “The house has two
bedrooms”, Chris said. “Each of us could have our own office!” This would be a
big plus because we had been sharing a small office for years and it was
sometimes difficult to get stay focused – with all that was happening in that
cramped space most of the time.
We scrapped up all the money we could gather together and
were able to come up with the 20% down payment needed, and purchased the
property on which our company is still located. We were jubilant, as was our
small staff. Preparations began to move the business from our little ‘house on
the prairie’, into our fancy new corporate headquarters – in the little house
on Hwy 65. My wife was pretty happy about the new plan too!
Before the actual move we developed a number of concepts
for how we were going to transform the small house into an office building.
“We’ll each have our own offices in each of the two bedrooms, and the living
room will be the secretary’s office”, I suggested. We agreed we would keep the
kitchen as it was for the time being, because we’d need a place to take breaks
and eat lunch. This little house would work very well as an office for some
time to come.
As we were making these plans, it occurred to us that
because we were right on Hwy 65, people might want to drive in and purchase
some of the nursery stock we would be holding for upcoming landscaping jobs. As
long as we have such a great location, right on the corner, maybe we should
start a garden center? Being young and entrepreneurial, Chris and I agreed that
this was a good idea, even though neither of us had any retailing experience.
“How hard could it be?” said Chris? “We’ll put the nursery stock out there and
the people will drive right in and buy it”, I continued.
The problem of course was that we were broke and our
borrowing capacity was just about wiped out with the purchase of the property.
“We just can’t put nursery stock out there in the open without some sort of a
display, Chris”, I reasoned. “We have to have some sort of a building – at
least to hold the cash register. And we’ll have to hire some people to run this
business, because you and I are too busy all ready. If we are going to open up
a garden store, we have to have some sort of a building”, I continued.
We talked about this for some time, and agreed we
wouldn’t need a very big building because all we were planning to sell were
trees and shrubs. Time was also getting short because it was now nearly April
and our Spring Season was just around the corner. “Well, let me see if I can
come up with something that will work”, Chris said.
You have to remember that that brother Chris is really good at finding stuff, and
normally he gets a really good deal.
In addition, Chris thinks ‘out of the box’, often coming up with some pretty
wild ideas.
Just a couple of days later, Chris came in all excited.
“How about this idea?” he asked. “I found an antique caboose for only $3,500.
We can move it here and run the garden store right out of it.” Geez, I thought
to myself; this is a really wild idea, one that I doubted anyone had ever tried
of before.
“I’m not sure Chris. It’s possible, and we could probably
do it but I don’t think a caboose sitting in the middle of a field surrounded
by trees would be very appealing to the customers. Let me think about it for a
day or two”, I suggested. Chris was still really excited about the prospect and
agreed that while I thought about whatever it was I was going to think about,
he would work out the details of how to move the old caboose and how to deal
with it once it arrived.
It took me a couple of days, but when the idea came, I
got real excited, real fast. “Ok Chris, I’ve got it. We won’t just drop the
caboose in the middle of the field. We’ll put it about 75 feet north of the
house. Then we’ll build some kind of decking and trellising between the two and
add a nice cedar fence behind the decking. With the length of the house,
decking & trellising and caboose, our operation will be over 150 long and
look really cool – and big. What do you think”, I asked after I took a long
breath.
Brother Chris had done his part too. “I talked to some
guys and found one that has a big flatbed truck with train rails mounted on the
bed. When he moves a train car, he tilts the bed down and has big hydraulic
wench to pull the car up onto the bed. Then he drives to the new location,
tilts the bed back down again and lowers the train car on the railroad tracks.
I found some railroad ties and tracks; we can install them right where we want
them and our new caboose would sit there nice and pretty – like it was there
all the time.”
The plan was taking shape nicely, but we didn’t have much
time. We got together with a landscape architect we had used in the past, and
we came up with a loose conceptual plan that we liked. Then we went to work and
built the decking, trellising and fencing, measuring everything precisely in
preparation for the arrival of the caboose. After building our short little
railroad (40 feet long), the caboose arrived and was successfully launched on its
new set of tracks. Wow, we thought it all looked great – and affordable! The
whole deal cost just short of $20,000, the last of our lifetime savings.
Another one of our buddies, an electrician, ran juice to
the caboose and we bought an old, used cash register and put it on the table
inside the ‘dining’ area of our new railroad car. We called up our brother Jim’s
college buddy, Joe McCrossan who was in the asphalting business, McCrossan Construction.
Joe agreed to install a small asphalt
parking lot for what we thought was a pretty good price (it’s nice to have
buddies). He even agreed to give us a couple of months before we had to pay for
the work he did for us. A good thing because we were pretty much broke by that
time.
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| Mickman Brothers Great Northern Garden Center 1987 |
Well, despite the multitude of obstacles, we completed
this project on the Thursday before May 1st – just in time for the
Spring Garden Store season. Because all the commuters traveling down Hwy 65 had
been watching all this craziness for the past few weeks, and we ran an ad in
the Anoka Shopper, we had a very successful ‘Grand Opening’ that weekend. We sold
almost $5,000 worth of trees and shrubs – and talked to a number of new,
potential landscaping and Lawn Sprinkler customer!
We were in the Garden Center business!
That was all over 35 years ago. Much has changed over all
these years, and with our many dedicated, hard working staff members, we have
thrived. Step by step, never taking too big of a bite, we have grown our
building complex to include 15,000 feet of glass greenhouses, a nice big warehouse
including offices, and another attached office building. And of course our
beautiful retail Garden Store – which looks like an antique Railroad Depot (go
figure!).
Business now
happens at the speed of light, and it is difficult to keep up with the pace of
commerce in our new world. But one thing hasn’t changed: We still have our
original caboose, albeit in a different spot than it once was. When I’m
introduced to new people in our community, the most common response is, “Oh
yes, I know Mickman Brothers. You’re the garden center with the caboose!”
Note: There is another
thing about Mickman Brothers that hasn’t changed over the years; we never shy
away from new, original ideas. I’m sure that our openness to consider new
ideas, technologies and processes is one of the things that has enabled us to prosper
all these years; that, and a lot of hard work. But, if you ask our mother Lucy,
she will say it’s because she and our dad raised us right.
You decide…
John S. Mickman
President
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