When Karine Neuberg visited her relative Laur Larsen in Decorah in 1862, she explored the limestone bluffs, rolling hills, oak savannas and prairies of the Oneota river valley. The Ho-Chunk people, forcibly moved from their home in Wisconsin, settled in Decorah, only to be moved less than a generation later. Karine would have looked upon their burial mounds, abandoned living spaces, nestled among the Burr oaks and vegetation of the valley. 

Karine wrote to her sister, saying, “I think it is the most beautiful place I have seen here in the West.”

Though the landscape has been changed by the growth of Luther College, the sentiment remains. Old Main was built between 1862-65, from trees grown in the area, with limestone quarried from the land, and clay for the more than two million bricks dug from a gaping pit in the center of campus. Right in front of Old Main, this chasm remained, one day to be replaced by a large cottonwood tree.

In 1909, a man named Jens Jensen was hired by the Luther College Club to redesign the landscape of campus. A Danish immigrant, Jensen was a renowned landscape architect who worked with the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Ford and many other famous architects. With the knowledge that the original landscape of the valley could not be restored, Jensen wished to turn the campus into a symbolic representation of the Midwest, removing the straight and militant avenues of trees that had been planted in place of the wild prairies. He replaced them with clusters of oaks, creating a clearing in front of Main, another in front of Preus Library and a clearing where the Center for Faith and Life would one day be built.

“[Jensen] had come to reshape this landscape in ways which would allow traditions to remain strong and the campus to remain in harmony with its prairie environment,” J.R. Christianson wrote in a 1986 article about the landscape of Luther College for the State Historical Society of Iowa. “What could be more appropriate than a “prairie campus” located amidst such trees, what could be more appropriate than a college which each spring, as the oaks set forth their tassels and leaves, also sent forth its graduates– children of the prairie region itself?” 

In front of Main, he planted a cottonwood tree, standing by itself, as a representation of the American plains. 

“In creating his idealized versions of the natural landscape, Jensen frequently assigned descriptive traits to plant materials,” Robert Grese and John Harrington wrote in their 1985 updated campus master landscape plan. “The cottonwood was described as a lonely sentinel out on the expansive plains; oaks expressed the continuity of a landscape through time. Wildflowers planted in unmown grasses were symbols of the tall prairie.”

In his design, Jensen created a place of community learning that was intertwined with the unique natural landscape of the surrounding rocks, rivers and trees. 

“Jensen rarely used trees as specimens except for rare cases such as his use of the cottonwood on campus which he felt reflected the regional character where these trees naturally occurred,” Grese and Harrington wrote. “Otherwise, he insisted that trees and shrubs, like people, needed “friends” close by and so he planted [them] in large irregular groups and massings.” 

The cottonwood tree stood, through the fire in New Old Main in 1942, the construction of Main III in the 1950s, the fire in Preus Gymnasium in 1961 and the construction of the Center for Faith and Life 1977. 

For Luther’s 125th anniversary in 1986, the Luther College Women’s Club of Decorah commissioned an updated landscape plan for the campus, keeping in line with Jensen’s original vision for the landscape of Luther. Robert E. Grese, an expert on Jensen’s work, and John Harrington, a Mid-American flora specialist, created a new zone to restore and uplift the campus in its newer form, as the college expanded over the years. 

This has continued through the subsequent years, on the 200 acres of campus land and 800 additional acres of natural lands. As the cottonwood tree ages, in the twilight years of its life, there is a desire on campus to continue its legacy through the next generations of students who will call Luther College home. Perry Halse and Paul Frana, Luther grounds workers, created a plan to propagate the tree in the 2010s, with little success. Eventually, a tree service took cuttings from the very top of the expansive tree, sending some of the cuttings to Powell Gardens in Kansas City, and propagating some on the Luther campus. Five of the Luther cuttings survived, and one was planted just north of the old cottonwood in October 2015. It continues to thrive today. 

Amy Weldon, professor of English, feels a unique connection with this old tree, and all it represents for the history and longevity of this campus.

“We talk about the Tree of Life, the branching and you can see why this helps us talk about the natural world’s metaphor,” Weldon says. “It helps us talk about why we need the natural world to continue to supply metaphor meaning. What happens to language if it gets too divorced from physical life. It becomes meaningless, literally. I love the tree. Love it. And as ever, with a big, magnificent tree like that, any living thing that is really, really old is a tangible connection with the past. Through this being’s consciousness, past the things, people, places, years that seem safely consigned to the dustbin of history, and yet this being witnessed them, and this being is still alive. So then does that mean that those other events or manifestations of realities are still alive somewhere. Or, as Walt Whitman would say, the smallest spark shows there’s really no death. All goes onward and outward. Everything collapses, and to die is different from what anyone supposed.”

The cottonwood in front of the third iteration of Main was planted long before most of us were alive, a silent sentinel for generations of students at this institution. It has stood through evolution and constant change within this campus, this town and the world outside of it. This tree, and some day, a propagation from its branches, will continue to frame students’ learning, and experience of this college, this town and the nature that surrounds it. 

“This is about eternity,” Weldon says. “It’s about time, and it’s about what matters. The natural world reminds us there’s more. We’re outside, and we just look up and we just look around and breathe deeply, and realize this feeling that we have in this moment is always here, it’s always available. It’s always waiting. The natural world is that too, we choose not to see it. We forget that it exists when it’s right under our noses.”