The Engwalls Garden Center property in Hermantown is up for sale, with an asking price of $1.495 million.
The longtime locally owned florist and greenhouse business is not closing, however. Engwalls is looking for a new location to replace the property at 4749 Hermantown Road that it has used for more than 125 years. The garden center will remain open until a new location is found and readied for business.
“The message is that the property will be sold, not Engwalls,” owner Rod Saline said Friday. “We are going to continue to operate for years and years into the future.”
It’s not yet known where Engwalls will move.
“We will clearly remain in the Twin Ports area,” Saline said. “We certainly have a lot of history here. The answer to the question will be a timing question on when a sale would take place - and it could be a year, it could be two years - and on what other buildings and land are available.”
The Hermantown property covers nearly 27 acres. Engwalls’ next garden center could be a smaller parcel.
“We don’t need all that is here right now,” Saline said. “Currently, from an operational prospective, we would use about 5 acres. We use a little bit more in the fall with the corn maze. That’s another 3.5 acres. We clearly don’t need 27 acres.”
According to the property listing at F.I. Salter Real Estate Services, the property is 26.93 acres in size, and comes with a four-bedroom house, two-bedroom apartment, a greenhouse, retail, office and storage space.
Saline said the demand for new residential development in the area is the main reason the decision was made in July to explore selling the property. The property was listed this week.
Peter Hanson walked from St. Paul in 1868 to homestead the property.
“It started out as a dairy farm,” Saline said. “Then there were a lot of vegetables farmed on the land.”
At some point, the family began using hot beds to give themselves and their neighbors an early start on planting.
Hanson’s son-in-law, William Engwall, took over the farm in the late 1800s. The Engwall family ran the business until 1970, when Clarence Engwall sold the company to Bud Renning, Don Rosacker and Marv Saline. Rod Saline joined the business in 1974, and became a partner in 1987.
The Engwalls retail store in Superior will not be affected by the relocation of the Hermantown center.
