Imagine opening a 75-year-old letter written in Jens Jensen’s own hand. Imagine a photograph of Harriet Knudson standing by Springfield’s new lakeshore, dressed in the finery of her day. Imagine perusing original news clippings on the creation of Lincoln Memorial Garden, which he designed and she so thoroughly promoted.
That’s just part of the thrill for the members of a special new team of amateur archivists who are hard at work cataloguing this history. As part of the Garden’s 75th Anniversary celebration, team members -- Brenda Larison, a librarian by day, Courtney Reed, a new Garden volunteer, Joyce Munie, a past president of the Board, Helen Adorjan, a newly retired Board member, and current Board President Joan Walters -- also are creating a system for preserving important documents in the Garden’s future.
They have begun to separate materials into folders by year. Even at this stage, it’s difficult not to catch the excitement of discovery. Among those discoveries are early letters from Jens Jensen at The Clearing in Wisconsin to Mrs. T.J. Knudson of Gladacres in rural Springfield. Harriet Knudson was the organizational muscle behind Lincoln Memorial Garden. Jensen was the creative genius. He, already famous, took on the project of designing a garden to honor Abraham Lincoln because she asked him to. There is only one side to this conversation in these files, but over the years, his letters encompass the inspirational to the mundane, implying a respect between them and much back-and-forth on the minutia that goes into creating a landscape from scratch -- what to plant where and how to get boulders moved from Wisconsin. The problem of the boulders, by the way, required many, many letters. As it turns out, they had to be moved from Missouri.
What these letters give us is history on a human scale, and in real time. Here’s a snippet of a letter written on February 10, 1936.
Along the lake in places where the land is appropriate for meadows, or for a meadow landscape, thousands of native flowers will find their home, and so there will be the lily meadow, and the phlox meadow and the shooting stars and the black-eyed-susans to reflect the colors of the prairies in days gone by when these colors were so strong that they were reflected against the sky above. Here we may have them only in a limited way, but still sufficient in their grandeur to reflect some of the beauty which was Illinois and teach coming generations a love for this beauty that has changed into fields.
It’s fun, too, to be present at the creation of Garden traditions. On October 13, 1939, Jensen expressed appreciation for an invitation to what must have been the precursor to Indian Summer Festival. He expressed regrets that he could not attend the “festival to The Fallen Leaf.” Even with the motor car, he wrote, it is a long way. But, he enthused, “To meet around the council-fire in a joyful and happy way at a time when nature is having its last fling before winter’s sleep creates new feelings in the human consciousness towards the earth of which we are all a part and from which we get our sustenance. It is a recognition of nature’s wonderful work and its supreme power.”
The archival team is seeking professional guidance on how best to protect such documents from the elements and is acquiring a few tools of the archival trade, including special gloves. Extra dollars raised in connection with the celebration may help defray some of these costs.
But the opportunity to hold -- and hold onto -- this history is priceless.
