Jens Jenson Homestead

Jens Jenson served the Confederacy, though his Norwegian neighbors had voted otherwise. The Handbook of Texas says Bosque County voted for secession on February 23, 1861, but the Norwegians voted against it, 52 to 42. It adds that the Norwegians of southern Bosque County kept Union sentiments through the war without joining the fighting, and that the Norwegians stopped coming to the county. The plaque has Jenson, a sailor berthed at Galveston, in the Confederate Army, so his service ran against the vote his Norwegian neighbors cast.

What the plaque says

Jens Jenson Homestead Jens Jenson (1835-1912) came to this county with his Norwegian parents and their family in 1854. Later he was a sailor berthed in Galveston for some years; he also served in the Confederate Army in the Civil War (1861-65). After he bought part of his parents' land in 1867, he built one stone room of this house and married Sarah Swenson in 1868. As his family grew to 11 children, he added rooms, three of stone, two of wood. After his death, a son, Palmer, bought the place. In 1958 grandson Arden Jenson purchased the land. He lives in the house, farming the ancestral acres. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bosque Museum — 8.5 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Meridian State Park — 8.6 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Hamilton County Courthouse — 24 mi
  A limestone courthouse of 1886-87 on the Hamilton square, built after the county's 1878 courthouse burned, enlarged in the early 1930s and rededicated in 2012 after restoration.

More markers nearby

• The Rock Church - St. Olaf Lutheran Congregation — 3.0 mi
• Cleng Peerson — 3.7 mi
• Norwegian Settlements in Bosque County — 4.5 mi
• Clifton Lutheran College — 8.5 mi