A New Take On An Extraordinary Life

Jens Jensen was a man of many talents and accomplishments. He is best known for being a visionary landscape architect who played a leading role in conceiving and developing the “prairie style” of landscape design, a new aesthetic that helped give the Midwest a distinct identity and helped launch the native plant movement. He was also a passionate and influential conservationist at a time when land conservation was a very important issue in the United States, and was a staunch advocate for the preservation of important native landscapes in the Midwest, including several in Door County, most notably Door Headlands County Park and Ellison Bluff County Park. And finally, in 1935, when he was 75 years old, he founded The Clearing Folk School in Ellison Bay—his “school of the soil,” where, for 79 years and counting, people have come to learn, to create and to reconnect with the native landscape.

A new documentary film, Jens Jensen: The Living Green, explores Jens Jensen’s extraordinary life. The 55-minute film is the creation of filmmaker, Carey Lundin, and is narrated by Jensen’s great granddaughter, Jensen Wheeler Wolfe. The Door County premiere of the film, sponsored by The Clearing, will be on Tuesday, September 9th at 7 pm at the Door Community Auditorium in Fish Creek. Lundin will be on hand to introduce and discuss the film.

Jensen was born in Denmark in 1860, the eldest son of a prominent farm family. When he was four years old, southern Denmark was invaded by Germany, with the decisive battle of the war being fought on land that included the Jensen farm. Germany prevailed, and southern Denmark would remain under German occupation until 1920. So Jensen grew up under German rule and was drafted into the German army when he came of age in the early 1880s. He spent much of his military service in Berlin, where he developed a keen interest in landscape design, and spent much of his free time in the parks and gardens of what was at that time a beautiful garden city.

After his military service, Jensen returned home and fell in love with Anna Marie Hansen. His parents thought her unsuitable because she was from a lower social class. So Jens and Anna Marie emigrated to America, where, after working for a time in Florida, and then in Iowa, they found their way to Chicago, where Jens got a job as a street sweeper in Union Park, a small park on Chicago’s west side. He quickly moved up, first as Superintendent of Union Park, then of Humboldt Park, and finally of the entire Chicago West Parks District. He found inspiration for his parks designs in the prairies on the outskirts of town, and turned away from the formal garden style that was popular at the time. He was at the forefront of the prairie style movements that influenced fellow landscape architects, along with others, including renowned architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan.

A falling out with corrupt Chicago politicians led to Jensen’s dismissal from the West Parks District and the subsequent development of what was to become a thriving private practice in landscape architecture. He designed the estates of many of America’s most prominent businessmen, including Henry Ford, Edsel Ford, Julius Rosenwald, J. Ogden Armour, Harold Florsheim and Edward Uihlein. He also designed public spaces, including the Racine, Wisconsin parks system, the Luther College campus in Decorah, Iowa and the Lincoln Memorial Garden in Springfield, Illinois. When he died in 1951, at 91 years old, the New York Times called Jens Jensen the “Dean of American landscape architects.”

Much of his land conservation work was done through The Friends of Our Native Landscape, a conservation group he helped organize and for which he served as the first president. This group was responsible for the establishment of various state parks throughout the Midwest. Jensen also conceived the Cook County Forest Preserves, a system of natural areas that eventually grew to include surrounding counties. He led the fight to preserve the Indiana Dunes and in the 1940s in Door County, when he was in his 80s, led a committee of influential Door County citizens who helped identify and arrange for the purchase of important wild areas for use as county parks, town parks and school forests. These “Jensen parks,” as some of us call them, include Door Headlands and Ellison Bluff County Parks, two “jewels in the crown” of Door County’s park system. Jensen was also a key member of the group that established The Ridges Sanctuary in 1937, saving this choice natural area from development.

Jens Jensen moved full time to Door County in 1935, a year after his wife died, and spent his last 16 years on 128 acres that he had initially bought in 1919 as a summer retreat for his family. It was here that he built The Clearing. He had attended a folk high school as a youth in Denmark, was profoundly influenced by its informal, “hands on learning” philosophy, and had dreamed for years of establishing a folk school for young adults, including young landscape architects, somewhere in the upper Midwest. He wanted a place “on the edge of the wild, high up on a hill or cliff, looking out over a large expanse of water, with a view of the setting sun.” Ellison Bay was the perfect place, and he would live the final years of his extraordinary life there, building and developing his folk school and teaching the lessons the native landscape has to tell.

Jens Jensen: The Living Green has won numerous awards since its release. It premiered on June 19th in Chicago’s Millennium Park, where 3,000 people attended, and was recently shown on WTTW, the PBS station in Chicago. The Millennium Park event kicked off an 18-month-long series of screenings in parks, on PBS stations and at conferences, schools and universities that the film’s maker, Carey Lundin, calls the Jens Jensen: The Living Green Movement.

Door County’s contribution to this movement is on Sept. 9 at 7 pm at the Door Community Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. Free-will offerings will be much appreciated and will help fund the building of a blacksmith forge at The Clearing.

Peninsula Arts and Humanities Alliance, Inc., which contributes Culture Club throughout the summer season, is a coalition of non-profit organizations whose purpose is to enhance, promote and advocate the arts, humanities and natural sciences in Door County.