We work hard to make our forest and farm a great experience for all ages. It holds many warm memories for four generations of the Hansen family and many of our friends and workers. Dress for the weather and we're sure you will have an enjoyable adventure. While our forest is less than a mile from the Northstar Commuter Rail depot in Ramsey, once you come through our gate you'll think you've landed in the north woods. We try to enhance that feeling in many ways; our log structures, campfire, hay rides, cars out by the fields and under big pines rather than in a congested lot, native prairie areas, and foremost the tall pines that intersperse our fields of Christmas trees and trails that connect them all.
Henry Hansen envisioned our farm-forest as a model, common in Scandinavia, of a productive forest near an urban area. The lesson is that trees are a renewable resource and we can enjoy the land, harvest from it, use it for recreation and relaxation, take care of it with intensive work, share it with deer-turkeys-pheasants-eagles-owls, and with a fair price for our product it is sustainable. There are areas of northern Europe that have been managed like this for hundreds of years. Following is our relatively short history...
In 1952 Henry Hansen, Charlotte Hansen, and her father Harry Lindquist planted their first trees. Henry was a forestry professor at the University of Minnesota and had seen Christmas tree 'plantations' in the eastern U.S. But in Minnesota trees were still harvested from the wild and hauled in to sell as Christmas trees. Hansen Tree Farm became the first farm in the state to plant and grow trees to become Christmas trees. Henry and Charlotte planned to - and did - use the profits to pay for college for their two - and by 1954, three - boys to college.
