Place  /  Debunk

Wisconsin's Long and Winding Road Has a Secret Past

For decades, locals believed landscape architect Jens Jensen designed this twisty stretch of Highway 42—the real history is even more serpentine.

Combining Jensen’s love of curvy roads, his proximity to the twisting stretch of Highway 47, and his role as a design advisor to Door County, it’s easy to assume that Jensen was the road’s architect, but it turns out that’s not the case—at least, not entirely.

“There is no evidence that Jens Jensen was directly involved with the design of the winding road. He was aware of the project and publicly approved of it,” says Steven Rice, Museum and Archives Manager at the Door County Historical Museum. He points out a letter Jensen wrote to the Door County Advocate in 1935, praising the road after he drove on it.

“Someone with a soul and a love of growing things must have directed this work,” Jensen wrote, noting how “quietly the road winds through the woodlands.”

Rice adds that a museum researcher actually found minutes from a town meeting that named George Schultz, a local farmer and road supervisor, as the head of the highway project. According to oral histories, the road’s shape “came from a desire to avoid cutting down too many trees,” says Rice.

Nonetheless, Jensen still might’ve been involved in the road’s construction. “Oral traditions in northern Door County still make the case for Jensen,” says Rice. “Whether he directly supervised the work, inspired it, or had no direct involvement at all, it is unquestionably in line with his views on the relationship between nature and the built environment.”

Even though the mystery of Jensen’s involvement in Door County’s winding road persists, his legacy in the region will continue to live on. After his death in 1951, Jensen’s secretary Mertha Fulkerson kept The Clearing running, and it still operates today in the same location as a folk school offering classes and workshops.

A few decades later, Jensen had a direct impact on the twisty highway. In the 1970s, planners proposed straightening the road, and Rice says Jensen’s ideas were used publicly to oppose it. A 1973 letter to the Door County Advocate from writer Norbert Blei, for example, quoted Jensen’s writing and noted Jensen’s mindset of “putting trees and the poetry of landscape before people” as a reason to keep the curves.