"There is No Greater Beauty Than That at Your Door"
Jens Jensen
and Indiana Dunes State Park
By Christopher Baas
Landscape architect Jensen is photographed with the fountain at the
original location at Indiana Dunes State Park.
“Nowhere on Earth,” is there anything like the Indiana dunes, declared the silver-haired speaker with a thick, Danish accent. Nowhere on Earth is there such “a wonderful exhibit of primitive life.”
The speaker, an immigrant landscape architect named Jens Jensen, was addressing a 1916 lakeside rally to stir support for establishing a sand dunes national park. Realizing that dream proved to be a monumental effort requiring the help of many, but Jensen and his fellow conservationists set the stage.
BECOMING A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT
Jensen had a long, varied and fruitful career as a designer, conservationist and teacher. His design work extended into the 1940s. It included mostly residential and park design, but he also created landscapes for subdivisions, schools and Lake County’s “ideal section” of the Lincoln Highway. Jensen also designed gardens for public figures such as then-Vice President Charles Fairbanks, and for Henry and Edsel Ford.
In the 1930s, he retired to teach at The Clearing, his school in Ellison Bay, Wis., until his death in 1951. Although only remnants of his Indiana works remain, his skills are best demonstrated by his designs of residential gardens for Hammond’s Morse Dell Plain, Crown Point’s William Whitaker and the Jam
es A. Allison Mansion, now part of the Marian College campus in Indianapolis.
Jensen came to this country from Denmark in 1884 at age 24, starting as a street sweeper for the Chicago West Park district. According to biographer Robert E. Grese, curiosity led the young man to explore and study the prairies of northern Indiana and Illinois. The landscape inspired Jensen to celebrate what most Americans considered ordinary.
Grese wrote that it is unclear how Jensen became a park designer, but by 1890 his work included an area of Union Park to which he added artistically placed native trees and shrubs. The design’s success vaulted his popularity and progression through the West Park ranks. Eventually, he ascended to superintendent and landscape architect of the district.
Jensen's prairie style of architecture reflected his conviction that "there is no beauty
greater than that at your door," as he was inspired by native plants of the dunes,
including prickly pear cactus (left). Interdunal ponds provide wetland habitats in
the swales between dunes, contributing to the region's diversity (right).
Jensen was instrumental in defining the prairie style of design that used the Midwestern landscape for inspiration. He dismissed the use of “foreign” plants as merely copying European trends, and instead stressed the use of native plants found in local dunes, prairies and woodlands. In a 1923 speech in Gary, reported the city’s Post-Tribune of March 28, he explained that “there is no beauty in the world greater than that at your door.”
Jensen also challenged his audience: “Why not be proud of the environment that is your own—that is American?” Jensen’s footpaths wandered throughout his landscapes, providing admirers varying viewpoints of his compositions. Waterfalls and rock outcroppings showcased stratified stonework. Many designs included his trademark “council ring,” a circular stone bench surrounding a fire pit.
DRAW OF THE DUNES
The dunes’ attractiveness to Jensen the naturalist is easy to understand. Several native plant communities converge in that northwest portion of Indiana—Eastern woodlands; shortgrass prairie; and the intricate, ever-evolving Lake Michigan shoreline. By 1900 the dunes had become both a scientific and aesthetic fascination for what Grese called Chicago’s “middle-class professionals and intellectuals” in his book “Jens Jensen: Maker of Natural Gardens and Parks.”
The University of Chicago’s Henry C. Cowles had recently published research describing Jensen’s theories of plant succession in the dunes. This landmark study and his subsequent teaching career have led Cowles to be considered America’s first ecologist.
The dunes were also romantically portrayed by writers, photographers and artists as something bigger than man himself, of nature’s ultimate dominance. Photographs in National Geographic and other popular magazines portrayed forceful images of blowouts, “moving” dunes consuming all in their paths, insurmountable inclines of sand, and tree “graveyards.” The dunes were depicted as “primitive” and “poetic,” described as a “flaming landscape” of “wild beauty.” Painters, most notably Chicago’s Frank Dudley, interpreted the dunes with colors and forms that captured the essence of the grand swaths of sand and sky.
Silhouetted figures on the beach at sunset are a timeless sight at
Indiana Dunes State Park (left).
Early settlement skipped over the region’s wet and sandy soils; however, by the late 19th century, lake and rail access allowed several industries and towns to boom. Unfortunately for dunes preservation, a full understanding of the significance of the dunes landscape coincided with monumental industrial and urban development on the lakeshore. One of the most dramatic changes was the construction of Gary, from scratch, in 1906.
In 1908 Jensen was leading his colleagues on “Saturday Afternoon Walking Trips” to “wild” areas to teach, recreate and experience the natural landscapes around Chicago. The tours’ popularity led to the creation of the Prairie Club, which helped organize these ventures. The club’s first trip to the dunes included 338 people, using the South Shore Railroad to reach a site near Gary. In 1913 the club constructed and dedicated a lakeside cabin by staging a masque (essentially an interpretive play) titled “The Spirit of the Dunes,” where acting, song and dance were showcased.
PUSHING FOR A PARK
Jensen personally promoted the idea of a park as early as 1914. As industrialists pressed to develop the dunes, conservationists further organized efforts to create a national park. In July 1916, a promotional “picnic” included the address by Jensen quoted at the start of this article and a dunes hike. An ad in The Gary Evening Post the 13th of that month, the same publication that covered the speech in its issue of the 17th, encouraged hikers to wear “high shoes, outing clothing or hiking suits,” to bring a “lunch, camera, field-glass and botany-glass ... go slowly, rest often” and note the “wonderful variety of plant life.”
Jensen delivered the address under a tent near the beach. He described how leading botanists and geologists had declared the dunes an exhibit of “primitive American life in all its aspects,” and said that “nowhere in the world was there such scenic beauty as can be seen from the summit of Mount Tom.” Jensen pledged his time and influence in establishing a park, concluding that, as the Post printed, the “people of this generation owe it to posterity to preserve this marvelous collection of natural wonders.”
In October 1916, Stephan T. Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, chaired a public hearing in Chicago to garner support for a national park. Again, Jensen offered a hand. Since the dunes were in competition with other sites for funding, he humorously described himself as “poor prairie folk,” who came from a place lacking the grand landscape of other regions of the country.
A series of 12 stamp-sized Save the Dunes "posterettes" were sold by the Prairie Club as a fund-raiser, citing "These are the seeds which, well-scattered, will raise our hopes to realization. Help us sow them broadcast throughout the land from ocean to ocean" (right).
He explained how he viewed the dunes as a midwestern Adirondack Mountains, and Mount Tom as one of the Rockies. In addition to the natural beauty and diversity he covered in his July address, Jensen focused on urban dwellers’ need for connection to nature. The Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 31, 1916, reported him as asking: “What are we doing for the tens of thousands of people in this noisy, grimy, seething city who need to revive their souls and refresh their inner man as well as their outer?”
In June 1917, in conjunction with the Prairie Club’s annual dunes hike, Thomas Woods Stevens’ pageant “The Dunes Under Four Flags” was performed. The event was staged in the Jensen Blowout, a natural bowl-shaped stage area near the Prairie Club’s beach house. More than 800 actors portraying Native Americans, traders, pioneers and soldiers participated. Dancers interpreted everything from tree “hearts” and wood nymphs, to the wind and waves.
Another effort to help raise public awareness about the need for a national park came in the form of a
grand pageant in 1917, featuring more than 800 actors and 25,000 spectators (left).
Graceful dancers embodied natural spirits including tree-hearts, wood nymphs, the wind and waves (right).
The event was rained out Memorial Day, but attended by more than 25,000 the next week. While organizers declared the first phase of “creating public sympathy” a success, funding for the park was lost after the country entered World War I. With funding requests routinely unanswered into the early 1920s, Mather moved on to other projects. Work for a national park was essentially abandoned.
Jensen and the Prairie Club refocused their efforts toward establishing a state park. This time they succeeded. Jensen worked with Richard Lieber, who had been appointed the state’s first director of the Department of Conservation in 1919, and previously proposed buying land at the dunes as a member of the state’s Centennial Commission. Their work resulted in the March 1923 Dunes Park Law, authorizing the purchase of 2,000 acres and 3 miles of lakefront. The park officially opened July 1, 1926. The current national park was finally authorized in 1966, and established in 1972.
A sizable tract of Prairie Club land was donated for the new state park. To commemorate this gift Jensen designed a fountain that was dedicated in 1932. The fountain displays a naturalistic pier of mortared stones, and an L-shaped bench. It is constructed of horizontal limestone slabs, giving it the appearance of a stratified outcropping. A bronze snake emerging from a stone crevice supplied spring-fed water to a small basin. A Chesterton Tribune report from June 2 that year described how the fountain “fit into its surroundings so well that it almost seems as if it has always been there.”
The cover of the Dunes Memorial Fountain dedication program from May 30, 1932 (left). A crowd gathers for the presentation of the Dunes Memorial Fountain to Indiana Dunes State Park, May30,1932, with Prairie Club president O.C. Bruhlman and Knowles B. Smith shaking hands (center)One of the fountain's unique features is a snakehead from which water flows (right)..
Artist Frank Dudley described to the Tribune how wonderful it was to, “after a week in the mad city,” sleep on the beach, cook over a fire, and walk the trails “to enjoy the birds, the flowers, the beach, with the knowledge that here is a place not desecrated by man.”
The painter first came to the lakeshore in 1912. His passion for depicting images of the landscape earned him the title “Painter of the Dunes.” He purchased land and constructed a small studio there, and was permitted to remain on site for the annual fee of one painting a year. The Tribune reported that, for Dudley, the fountain was a tribute to past “happy days,” and to the club’s “love and devotion to the cause of conservation.” Artist Frank Dudley, the Painter of the Dunes, and Prairie Club member, considered the fountain a tribute to the club's "happy days" (right).
“The Fountain,” a poem printed in that same Tribune issue, written by club member Helen Forman, was recited at the event. It recounts when the dunes were the club’s “very own:”
You who go swinging down the trail,
Pause by this fountain of its cooling spring
Drink deep; above, the birds a welcome sing—
Though seasons change, the waters will not fail.
Refreshed, press on, meadows and woods unveil
Fresh beauty, ‘till the last high climb will bring
For fitting climax to your wandering,
Vision of lake and sky where white gulls sail
So let our fountain of enduring stone
Stand here in memory of the glad years when
Part of these Dunes was once our very own—
A fount of youth to all who turn again
To Nature, when by worldly cares oppressed,
Finding in Duneland joyousness and rest.
By the 1980s the fountain had been consumed by sand and the bronze snake and bowl had disappeared. Actually, the snake vanished only a few weeks after the dedication. Pieces of the stonework became weathered or were buried. In combination with the construction of a new nature center, the fountain was moved to a more prominent location near its entry.
National Lakeshore landscape architect Eric Ehn, who lent assistance to the project, recounted how prison labor was used to excavate the structure, and how the pier was transported to its new location using a front-end loader. Ehn also located matching stone to replace the missing and broken pieces, and the Lakeshore funded a preservation mason to reassemble and repair the fountain. DNR chief landscape architect Dan Saffen designed the layout for the new location. Glenn Jensen, another department landscape architect of no relation, sculpted and cast a new snake and basin.
While only remnants of Jensen’s Indiana works as a landscape architect survive, his legacy as a conservationist endures in the 2,000 acres of Indiana Dunes State Park, a cause he found so worthy that he invested nearly 20 years working to assure the landscape’s preservation. As a landmark of this great cause, his Prairie Club fountain is once again being enjoyed by park visitors exploring this fascinating landscape.
