The turtle track behind the Nisswa Chamber building went quiet for the year on August 12. No more Wednesday lines of kids with racing buttons, no more Smiley making the rounds for high fives. By late September, Main Street has settled into the rhythm locals actually live with most of the year, the one without a schedule taped to a chamber window.
Walk that same stretch of Main Street on any ordinary week this fall and one storefront has been standing there since before the turtles ever raced, before the chamber built a track for them, before most of what people think of as "Nisswa tradition" existed at all. Martin's Sport Shop opens onto Main Street the way it always has, and next year it turns 100.
A Business Older Than Almost Everything Else Downtown
Martin Dullum opened Nisswa Oil Co. on Main Street in 1927. Three years later his service station blew up, which is the kind of setback that ends most small businesses before they get started. It didn't end this one. The business survived, reshaped itself into what became Martin's Sport Shop, and stayed in the family.
When Martin died in 1950, his sons Jim and Ted took over the sport shop and the family's marina business alongside their mother, Florence. Both brothers later earned Nisswa's Citizen of the Year honor, Jim in 1989 and Ted in 2014, which says something about how the town came to see two guys running a sport shop and marina on Main Street. Jim eventually bought out Ted's and Mary's share of the business with his wife, Shirley, keeping it under one branch of the family. Ted died in May 2015. Jim died in November 2018.
That's three generations and one explosion, and the shop is still standing where it started.
The Owner Who Started at the Popcorn Stand
Teresa Berg bought Martin's Sport Shop from her parents in 2009, making her the third generation to run it. Her connection to the place goes back further than ownership. She started working there around age 8, at a popcorn stand in the courtyard during the summers, before deciding around 12 that she didn't want to keep doing it. Her parents had a different plan. She went back to work, moved up to manager, and eventually bought the store outright.
In 2026 she realized May marked her 50th year working on Main Street in Nisswa. Her husband Ron works alongside her. The shop sits next door to Rafferty's Pizza, another fixture on the same short stretch of downtown that most people walking past for ice cream or a boat part probably don't think twice about.
Berg still gets customers who ask about her father, Jim, nearly eight years after he died. That's not a detail from a marketing packet. It's what happens when a business stays put long enough that three generations of the same family have handed the counter back and forth, and long enough that the people walking in remember all three of them.
The Calendar Resets Every Year. The Storefronts Don't.
Compare that timeline to what actually shows up on Nisswa's event calendar. The 63rd annual Turtle Races ran Wednesdays from June 3 through August 12 this year, which sounds like a long institution until you notice Martin's predates the first turtle race by 36 years. The Nisswa Fall Festival, held this year on September 19, was the 51st annual edition, and the Smokin' Hot BBQ Challenge that's grown up alongside it was only in its 21st year. This year's ribs went to Bone Island, taking first place and $2,000, with Bailey Acres in second and Ju-See BBQ in third. Wrecking Crew BBQ won the VIP Choice award and American Piggers took People's Choice. The historic Nisswa Pioneer Village hosted a craft fair the same day, the band Wyld Ryce played into the evening, and the Pickle Factory's parking lot and bocce courts ran cornhole and bocce ball tournaments through the afternoon.
All of that is real, and all of it is what most visitors experience as "Nisswa." None of it existed when Martin Dullum first opened his doors, and none of it will be the reason Main Street still feels like Main Street in another twenty years. Festivals get anniversaries. Storefronts get generations.
Once the Fall Festival wraps and the Pioneer Village clears out, Nisswa's calendar goes quiet again until the City of Lights celebration in late November. That gap is where the town actually lives most of the year, walking past the same handful of family-run shops that were there before this year's festival and will be there after it's forgotten. Martin's is the clearest example, but it's a pattern worth noticing on the rest of the block too. The businesses that anchor a downtown aren't always the ones with a chamber-run event attached to them.
What the Centennial Actually Marks
2027 will be the hundredth year Martin Dullum's business, in one form or another, has operated on the same stretch of Main Street. That's not a number tied to a festival attendance count or a BBQ prize purse. It's a number tied to three generations of one family choosing, repeatedly, not to sell, not to relocate, and not to let a 1930 explosion be the end of the story.
For anyone who's walked past Martin's Sport Shop a hundred times without registering what it's actually marking next year, that's worth a second look before the anniversary arrives. Main Street's tourist calendar turns over every summer. This is the one storefront that hasn't.
We spend a lot of time in Nisswa learning which parts of a town outlast a season and which parts define it. If you're curious what else on Main Street has that kind of staying power, or what it actually means for a home nearby, Larson Group is easy to find a conversation with.
