(light guitar music) (light guitar music) (light guitar music) -[Donna] My name is Donna Trompke and I'm president of the Sherman County Historical Society in Loup City, Nebraska.

Jenner's Park, it was founded by these two gentlemen that came from England, Henry and Bob Jenner.

(lightguitar music) The park had different amusements, different games.

There was a mummy house, (light guitar music) the Dance Pavilion, (light guitar music) Lover's Lane.

(light guitar music) There would have been a bear, birds, owls.

(light guitar music) And then as they got older, they wanted to sell Jenner's Park.

The family was not interested in continuing on with all the care that it took for the animals and for the different amusements.

So the park ended up closing in 1940-something.

(light guitar music) Will Stoutamire, professor from University of Nebraska at Kearney, and his student, Logan, have been doing a lot of research on Jenner's Park.

They are going to be sharing the results of their studies with the Sherman County Historical Society.

- And so really for us, one of the things that we wanna be thinking about is how we can use the remnants of the park that are still here as evidence of where other things would've been.

As we're looking at the historic photographs, or we're looking at the tour guide from the 1920s, or we're looking at other accounts of the park from the time.

So right here we've got the original bear den or bear cage, which we've got this photograph of.

- [Logan] Yep.

- [Will] It lines up pretty nicely for us.

- [Logan] The park wouldn't really be open until about May-ish.

Kinda like how most summer attractions are right now.

You know, you open Memorial Day and go until Labor Day.

(whimsical music) - [Will] Towards the end of World War I going into the Great Depression, 1920s is really when the park is thriving.

It's driving in its highest number of visitors.

And the Jenner's are every year making some sort of an addition.

People from Kearney, and Grand Island, and Holdredge and Albion and, you know, any of the smaller communities in the Sandhills would come down for opening day, or 4th of July, or Harvest Fest.

Reports in the newspaper of crowds of, you know, three, four, 5,000 people, you have to take that with a grain of salt, but certainly a large number of people come into the park to experience what there was to experience on those days.

- [Logan] But opening day was really their big, or one of their big days where they would make a big hoopla about it.

They'd have fireworks, and food vendors out here, and, you know, all trains led to Loup City.

(Whimsical music) - [Will] And if I remember correctly, we've got a photograph of the, of the bear cage with one of the bridges leading over Lover's Lane, right?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- So if we're looking at the bear cage, you can see the angora goats, you can see the peccaries.

- Yeah.

- So that all lines up if this is the Old Creek bed.

- Yeah.

- And I think from there that would put the ocean wave ride like right here.

- Pretty much.

And then, yeah.

(wind rustling) - Somewhere in here.

So that would've been the big- Yeah.

- The big amusement feature.

-The Ocean Wave.

-- The Ocean Wave.

So yeah, the ocean wave kind of was basically a giant amusement swing.

And they talked a lot about it having music.

Yeah, I think they claimed they could fit like 40 people on it.

(carnival music) (guitar string plucking sound) - [Logan] So some of the things we've discovered through this project is when we were first looking into the Jenners, they claimed they had graduated from Eaton and King's College.

And then we look into it, we email those colleges.

And they get back to us and say, "We have no record whatsoever of Henry or Robert Jenner going to these colleges."

And then, so then that got us thinking, it's like, "Okay, well if they're lying about that..." -- Right -- What else?

- There's much more in their biographies that they were sharing locally that we then had to investigate and see if those things could actually be viable and true.

They've claimed to have connections to There's a claim that the family was close friends with the Egyptologist at the British Museum.

And then there's a claim that the Egyptologist gave a Egyptian Scarab necklace to Henry Jenner that he then wore for the rest of his life.

The Jenner's weren't necessarily doing a lot of world traveling despite the fact that their collections come from across the globe.

But it gives you this impression that they're you know, going all around the world making these collections for their institution like larger professional museums in the time would've been doing.

And so it seems like what they're relying on more is when those larger professional museums go under, they go to the fire sale and buy some stuff and bring it out here.

- [Logan] They claimed to have actual Egyptian mummies from Egypt that they allegedly bought from The University of South Dakota.

There's a whole big story about how Henry Jenner drove to the University of South Dakota and purchased a mummy from the archeologist there, and then drove it back to Loup City in his convertible in the passenger seat.

(chuckling) What a wild sight that would've been.

- And certainly nobody in 1907, you know, Loup City is gonna be back checking their resume.

At the same time, you know, they claimed to be from a brewing family in South London, that turned out to be true.

They claimed to have come from some money, that turned out to be true.

So a lot of the parts of their biography did line up.

We've had them described to us by someone -as a showman.

-- [Logan] Yes, showman.

- [Will] And I think that's a fairly apt description.

- Yes.

- That they were willing to exaggerate here or there, (light music) but operating with a grain of truth underneath all of it at the same time.

(light music) - [Logan] You have these two wealthy British men that come to the United States and they try and recreate the British Museum.

And they have all of these wonderful pets and it's all well and good.

And then you look into it, and their stories of like the deer running down Henry Jenner, or Robert Jenner's, you know, allegedly, getting drunk and getting bitten by tarantulas.

And you've got people stealing stuff from the museum.

- [Will] The story of Jenner's Park is the story of the wild world of early museums.

That it's the story of, you know, two guys with a vision, and connections, and money being able to build a museum, and amusement park, and zoo in the central part of Nebraska in a small town, which is something you could only do in that time period with the connections that they had in that area of colonialism.

And so to me it's just the perfect story of a small museum in that era.

(light guitar music)