Jensen Historical Farm Collection, 1959-2003

The Ronald V. Jensen Living Historical Farm, a program of Utah State University, was started in 1970 with a donation from USU agriculture alumnus, R.V. Jensen, who specified that his gift be used to establish a working farm museum that involved students in its operation. The museum was located on 120 acres near Wellsville in southern Cache Valley, Utah, at the former Franklin H. Wyatt farm. Buildings representative of Cache Valley's history were relocated to the site to recreate a historic family farm. (The original Frank Wyatt farmhouse still exists on the property but had been modernized and was not suitable for inclusion.) The collections of the Man and His Bread Museum, an indoor museum of agriculture-related artifacts founded on the USU campus in the late 1950's, were also relocated to the Jensen Historical Farm site.

In 1985 folklorist and outdoor museum specialist Jay Allan Anderson was hired to direct the Jensen Historical Farm museum and establish a master's degree program in Outdoor Museum Administration. Anderson changed the Farm's time period from a generic "pioneer farm" to the year 1917, a prosperous year for Cache Valley farmers and a date which the museum's artifact collections could support. During Anderson's tenure at the Farm (1985-1993), graduate students operated all aspects of the museum, from restoration of artifacts to animal husbandry to research to costumed interpretation. When Anderson left the Farm in 1993 the focus of the program began to shift so he transferred the research collection to USU Special Collections. The Jensen Historical Farm was eventually subsumed by the newly-formed American West Heritage Center.