Ed Martis: "Born to mint farming"
A 2005 Mint Grand Marshal recalls life on the farm

I was born in 1933 to mint farming – the son of a mint farmer and grandson of one of Clinton County’s mint pioneers in the mid-1920s, John Martis, Sr. My parents, Paul Sr. and Theresa (Sipkovsky) Martis, worked with and for his father who owned the Greenbush Township farm of approximately 300 acres on Colony and Scott roads. We lived in a house on the Scott Road farm.

At some point when I was three years old, we left the farm for several years and part of that time we lived in Bancroft where my father operated a mint farm owned by a gentleman named Mr. Fisk of Lima, Ohio. I started school while we were living there.

In 1941 we were back on Scott Road to manage my grandfather’s farm. In the mid-1940s my parents were purchasing approximately 200 acres of my grandfather’s farm on Scott and Colony roads.

The peppermint crop my grandfather had started in the mid-1920s was almost extinct, having developed verticillium wilt in the late 1930s; so in the early 1940s during World War II we raised a lot of vegetables: carrots, red beets, sugar beets, spinach, dill, onions and potatoes.

We returned to raising mint in the mid-1940s. Scotch spearmint seemed to thrive on the muck for some time but then developed the wilt disease as peppermint had in the 1930s. We turned to a new variety, native spearmint, that is the predominate variety raised today, along with some peppermint.

I graduated from Rodney B. Wilson High School in St. Johns in 1951, leaving behind – regretfully – my football days as a halfback on the 1949 and 1950 undefeated teams. I enjoy most sports, but football is my passion yet today. I worked with my father on the farm for several years before serving in the U.S. Army in 1954 and 1955 where I did get to play a few more football games.

After my discharge, I returned to the farm to work. In 1957 I went to work for Federal-Mogul Corporation in St. Johns for about 12 years, leaving as an industrial engineer. Starting in 1969, I was employed as a salesman for Chocola Cleaning Materials in Lansing where I continue to work. While working fulltime at this job, I also started a janitorial business of my own in 1976 that I continue to own, manage and fill in when needed.

Together with my brothers, Paul and Don, we grew up working with our father on the farm by the age of 10 and driving tractor as soon as we were big enough to reach the controls. Later my maternal uncles, Frank and Louie Sipkovsky, became mint farmers in the same neighborhood and we all worked with them also. Both Frank and Louie are previous Mint Festival Grand Marshals.

In 1972 I purchased my parents’ Scott Road 100-acre farm. While working my fulltime job, I raised mint for another six years – plowing, fitting, fertilizing and stilling evenings and weekends. I loved farming and the mint production and had always hoped to make it my career. However small farms were not going to survive in the mint business, and the long hours necessitated in the fields made it impossible with my fulltime job and additional business. So I leased the land to Richard Woodhams and presently to Pete Kurncz, Jr., both of whom are previous Mint Festival Grand Marshals.

I miss mint farming. As they say, "You can take the boy out of the farm, but you cannot take the farm out of the boy."

In 1950 the grandchildren of two of Clinton County’s mint pioneers, John Martis Sr. and E. A. Livingston, met and dated – in 1956, I married Suzanne Livingston, the daughter of Alden and Doris Livingston. Alden, a mint farmer too, was the Mint Festival Grand Marshal of the second revived Mint Festival. Suzanne and I have a son, Edward Spencer Jr., who is a packaging engineer. He works and lives in Ohio with his wife, Susan.

Interestingly, the planting of mint in much of the swamp north of St. Johns that is bisected by US-127, was made possible by Suzanne’s foster great-grandfather, Henry M. Perrin. He believed the land could be drained and become productive; and because of that belief, he bought much of the acreage that was later drained through the engineering of his son-in-law, Dr. Henry Palmer (the digging of Hayworth Creek, etc.) Thus, the land could be cleared, enabling the planting of mint.

I am honored to have been selected as a Mint Festival Grand Marshal representing all that the mint production industry has meant to generations of my family and the community. Although my fields of mint dreams are gone along with all the old still whistles, may our community never lose the wonderful aroma of mint – the best time of year on the farm.