"It's priceless because of the memories." That's what Lynne Sage-Teichman said on the day her family's farm changed hands, standing on land her grandfather bought from a basket factory in 1928. She wasn't talking about the fruit. She was talking about a cherry pit.
For 45 years, Tree-Mendus Fruit Farm on Eureka Road in Eau Claire hosted the only cherry pit-spitting championship ever recognized by Guinness World Records. If you look up the record today, the location still reads Eau Claire, Michigan. Population 552 as of the last census. A village of 0.74 square miles that straddles Pipestone Township and Berrien Charter Township, named for a creek early settlers found running clear. If you drive out to the address on the record book, though, you won't find a single cherry tree in competition condition. The farm that made this village famous closed at the end of 2019. The record stayed. The place that earned it did not.
That gap between the fame and the ground it happened on is the story people who live here already half know and outsiders never quite believe. Here's the whole thing, in order.
A Joke That Turned Into the Only Contest of Its Kind
Herb Teichman opened Tree-Mendus in the early 1970s and helped bring the U-pick model to southern Michigan. He was known regionally as the Dean of Southwest Michigan Fruitgrowers, and in 1974 he started a pit-spitting contest at a summer picnic mostly to draw attention to his tart cherry harvest. The joke landed harder than he expected. He set it for the first Saturday of July, timed to peak cherry season, and it grew from a picnic bit into a real sporting event with judges, age categories, and a crowd that came back every year.
It became the only cherry pit-spitting competition Guinness World Records has ever recognized. A few families dominated it for decades:
- Rick "Pellet Gun" Krause won the championship 19 times across 40 years of competing.
- His son, Brian "Young Gun" Krause, set the recognized world record of 93 feet, 6.5 inches in 2003, a mark that still stands.
- Marlene Krause, Rick's wife, took the women's title seven times.
- Outsiders occasionally broke through the family dynasties: Bob Ickes of Dowagiac won in 1992 with a spit of 58 feet, 2 inches, and Ron Matt of Chicago won in 2012 at 69 feet.
The technique, if you're curious, favors a deep breath and a tucked tongue over raw force. Keep the pit dry, keep your lips loose. None of that matters anymore if you're trying to compete at the original site. It only matters if you're trying to win at the one place in Michigan that still runs a contest, which isn't Eau Claire anymore. More on that in a minute.
A 450-Acre Farm, Three Generations in the Building
The scale of what closed is easy to undersell if you only know the pit-spitting headline. William W. Teichman bought 160 acres from a basket factory in 1928 and started growing fruit. Herb and his wife Liz expanded it over the following decades into a 450-acre operation, a property long enough that people who worked there described it as mile-long. By the time the farm was in its third generation, it grew sweet and tart cherries, apricots, peaches, pears, plums, nectarines, and more than 200 varieties of apples. It had a country store, a petting zoo, narrated wagon tours through the orchards, and a phone line customers could call for the ripe and ready report before they drove out.
That's the version of Tree-Mendus that built up over 90 years. It came apart in about 90 days.
One Year, Three Losses
Herb Teichman died in January 2019 at age 88. That same year, a polar vortex swept through the region and did serious damage to fruit trees across southwest Michigan, Tree-Mendus included. Then, in August, Bill Teichman, the farm's third-generation operator, contracted Eastern Equine Encephalitis from a mosquito bite, a disease that killed roughly two-thirds of the Michigan residents who caught it that year. He survived, but he could no longer run the farm.
In late December, the family posted the news on Facebook. Tree-Mendus would close for good on December 31, 2019, and the entire 450-acre property would go on the market. A GoFundMe campaign helped with Bill's care. The 2019 pit spit, held that July, turned out to be the last one held at the farm that invented it.
What's on Eureka Road Now
The property auction was supposed to happen in the spring of 2020. COVID-19 pushed it back to Memorial Day. Glassman Auctions ran the sale, and the land went out in pieces. An 80-acre parcel sold for $335,000 to Dominick Moore, whose family runs Triple D Excavating just up Eureka Road from the old farm. Moore isn't a farmer. He grew up visiting Tree-Mendus as a kid, and the Teichmans are family friends. He told a reporter at the time that Will Teichman, one of Herb's grandsons, now works for his excavating company. He also said plainly that reopening the farm market wasn't something he was positioned to do.
That's the quiet ending most people outside Eau Claire never hear. The record is permanent. The address that earned it is now home to an excavating operation and whatever the other buyers of the remaining acreage decided to do with their share. There's no plaque, no roadside marker, nothing that tells a passerby that the ground under their tires once hosted competitors from as far as Chicago and Arizona.
Where the Torch Went
Michigan still grows about 75 percent of the country's tart cherries, somewhere near 300 million pounds a year, and the state hasn't let go of pit spitting as a summer tradition. It just moved north. Traverse City's National Cherry Festival, which first ran to mark America's 150th anniversary and reached its 100th year in July 2026, is now the only Michigan pit-spitting contest still standing. Eau Claire's ending in 2019 left it as the last one in the state.
There's also an informal tribute that keeps the story circulating nationally. International Cherry Pit Spitting Day falls every year on the first Saturday of July, timed exactly the way Herb Teichman timed his original contest, and it's marked well beyond Michigan now, in backyards and parks wherever cherries grow. The day exists specifically because of what started on Eureka Road, even though nothing about the day requires anyone to know that.
Why This Still Matters Here
If you've lived in Eau Claire a while, you already know some version of this. Maybe you went on a class field trip to Tree-Mendus, or your parents took you for the pit spit on a Fourth of July weekend, or you just grew up hearing the farm mentioned the way small towns mention their one claim to national attention. What's easy to lose track of is how completely that claim has separated from the place. The record book still says Eau Claire. The ground says excavating equipment and whatever's left of an orchard that isn't being tended for competition anymore.
It's the kind of detail worth having ready the next time someone asks why a village of 552 people shows up in a Guinness record, or why "eau claire" on a map sign means clear water instead of a French import from somewhere bigger. The answer isn't complicated. It's just not finished the way most towns' famous stories are. The record stands. The farm doesn't. Both things are true at the same time, on the same stretch of Eureka Road.
If you're curious about what else has changed in and around this stretch of Berrien County, or if a piece of Southwest Michigan history like this one has you thinking about the area differently, Andrea Hook-Graham would be glad to talk through what's happening in Eau Claire and the surrounding communities. Let's Connect.
