Windmill

photo courtesy Richard Moldenhauer

This windmill or lighthouse was the first sculpture made by Mollie Jenson. Homemade windmills and lighthouses were popular yard embellishments in the 1930s and plans were common in such magazines as Popular Mechanics. But Jenson didn't just follow a simple blueprint for her windmill, instead she turned the project into a 10-foot tall tower encrusted with extrvagant quilt-like designs of cats and dogs, trees, stars and other designs. There are windmill blades which turn in the wind, but the structure is topped with a cement lawn jockey for no apparent reason.

Mollie Jenson closed her zoo in 1959, and its concrete structures soon fell into disrepair. After Mrs. Jenson's death in 1973, most of the art exhibit was dismantled or destroyed to prevent anyone from becoming hurt on the broken glass shards and dilapidated structures. But one structure survived.

The windmill must have been sold when the zoo closed, because it reappears on these 1960-era postcards, 30 miles away in Wilson, WI, as an eyecatching monument in front of Schultz's tourist court with the sign "Home Comfort". A stone birdbath and pump complement the windmill in the front yard. The windmill appears fairly intact, from the colorful mosaics of cat and dog encounter, to the tiers of upended bottles, its remnants of sails, and the incongruous yard jockey on top who now is holding a boat propeller.

presented by Minnesota Museum of the Mississippi