90 years perennial: St. Croix nursery celebrates milestone anniversary

Sometimes people come into Abrahamson Nursery to reconnect with the rich scent of the earth, said Joie Nielson. In the long Minnesota winters, it’s something that she and the other employees of Abrahamson appreciate deeply. 

It all started in 1928, when the Abrahamson family established a farm store along St. Croix Trail N. in Scandia. Dan Sandager began working there as a teenager in 1960s. His father was an agriculture teacher in the Forest Lake school district, and he found his way to the Abrahamson farm through the FFA program. He worked there during high school and then college, when he began attending the University of Minnesota to study agriculture.

Sandager remembered that produce was a large part of the early business, and said that the Abrahamson family even did some on-the-road sales. 

“I was just a worker guy,” Sandager said. “The first job I ever had was potting roses in the greenhouse.”

He also remembers doing a lot of fieldwork in his early days at Abrahamson. “They were more growers than they were retailers,” he said. “Although they sold what they grew, it was a much smaller business, very labor intensive.” 

In 1972, the Abrahamsons felt they could no longer run the family business. Sandager and his wife Sue bought the nursery, and expanded it into the business it is today. 

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