When Barbara and Sean Martens agreed to take over Melville-based Thomas School of Horsemanship Summer Day Camp & Riding School, they knew it would be a passion project, albeit with challenges.
“It's very hard to make money in horses on Long Island, especially running a school program, with lots of horses that need constant care and you're running a lesson program,” Barbara Martens told Long Island Business News.
But the Martens are taking the reins in what is a labor of love in a challenging environment with many considerations, including nearly 60 horses, an accomplished Interscholastic Equestrian Association team, a riding school, barn hands, complications around land use and more all while continuing a 75-year legacy. They believed strongly in the school’s aim to foster a love of caring for horses and being in nature, all of which builds character, Martens said.
The business, which had been started by Bill and Fran Thomas in 1943, was kept in the family for three generations until the Martens took over in 2022, as LIBN previously reported. As for the land, that had been sold in 2018 to the developer of what is now The Estates at Melville.
As the new owners of the Thomas School Barbara Martens also works in finance, while Sean Martens owns a technology company the couple pushed up their sleeves. They knew the school well. Sean had ridden there as a boy, and again when their oldest daughter was a small child. The family now has three girls, all of them avid riders attending summer camp there, something Barbara appreciated as a working mother.
“Our involvement there kept growing and growing over the years,” she said. “We definitely had become very connected to the horses, to the staff and to everybody.”
The Martens needed to relocate the horses and the school to a temporary home as the houses were being built.
“We couldn’t fit on any one property,” Barbara Martens said. “Two other farms on Long Island were gracious enough to relocate our program there.” Three-quarters of the horses are now in Central Islip, and a quarter are in Huntington. Still, the ridership “has been absolutely tremendous about sticking with us even though we're not really operating out of very convenient locations for them,” she said.
Sean Martens brought his tech expertise to the business, including automation, scheduling and recordkeeping, barn management and surveillance. That expertise “has been a huge help to the business, especially, because we're running it from two separate locations,” Barbara Martens said. “I'm managing the finances.”
When running a horse farm on Long Island on other people’s land, there’s a premium, especially when “there's less and less stalls than there've ever been before because these horse farms are closing left and right,” Martens said. “It's pretty expensive and rightfully so, I don't begrudge that to anybody. We literally have a gigantic program. We have 24 school courses.”
In the interim, as part of the approval for the development, the Town of Huntington mandated that 7 acres, not 5, needed to be preserved as a horse farm. Still, the added acreage has significantly driven up the cost of the property, Martens said, which the school has yet to purchase.
Martens said she is trying to make the economics work for that property, but she’s also “actively trying to pursue an alternative location where we can run the program.”
But on an island where there is a shortfall of open space, that can be tough.
Meanwhile, Craig Kirsch, the developer of the property, said the “7 acres would 100% remain an equestrian facility, of course. We look forward to the Thomas School legacy to continue.”
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