Skjoldenæsholm dates back to the Middle Ages. The present main building was erected in 1766 in Neo-classicistic style. Skjoldenæsholm today is a beautifully renovated and well-equipped hotel, seminar, and conference centre with all modern facilities. The park is open to the public. Skjoldenæsholm Golf Course and the Tramway Museum are only a few hundred metres away from the estate.
The Andersen, Nielsen, and Hansen family members worked on this estate, or land owned by the estate, before immigrating to America.
Following is the editor's note for an article written by Pia Viscor in 2002 for the The Bridge which is published by the Danish American Heritage Society.
Traveling eastwards across the Danish island of Sjælland, you turn off superhighway E66 at Ringsted and take highway A1 towards Roskilde. Soon, you see a sign pointing to Jystrup and take the short side road to that village. The rolling countryside is idyllic, dotted with small lakes and ponds, tidy farmland alternating with forest. Jystrup lies on the eastern shore of a lake, with the church and village of Valsølille on the opposite shore. On a peninsula at the northern end of the lake are ruins of Skjoldenæs castle, beseiged and conquered by King Valdemar Atterdag in the mid-fourteenth century. Farther north, you see the manor house of Skjoldenæsholm that replaced the castle. It has been rebuilt several times; the manor you see today was built in the year 1766. Since 1794, the Skjoldenæsholm estate has been owned by the Bruun de Neergaard family.
In the year 1801, some 400 people lived in the parish of Jystrup, and another 450 lived in Valsølille parish. At Skjoldenæsholm , which lies in Valsølille parish, lived Major Johan Andreas Bruun de Neergaard, age thirty-two, his wife, Elisabeth Henriette, age twenty-eight, their daughter, Anna Joachirnine, age one, a housekeeper, two maids, six menservants (coachman, valet, footmen, and the like), nine milkmaids and other female workers, and three farmhands, eighteen people in all. Of course, most households in the two parishes were much smaller. They were mainly households of tenant farmers (crofters) and rural laborers. Some farms had a hired hand or two, besides family members. Crofter families worked their small plots of land without hired help. Many day laborers earned their wages in the vast barns and stables or on the wide fields of Skjoldenæsholm and sent their children to work at an early age. Farmer and crofter families were also required to provide labor to Skjoldenæsholm for so many days a year. In one way or another, everybody in the two parishes seemed to work for Major Bruun de Neergaard. He owned nearly everything: many tenant farms (crofts) and cottages, the mill, vast forests beyond the manor, even the village churches in Jystrup and Valsølille.
Major Bruun de Neergaard was a very ambitious man who worked hard to improve his estate, even at the expense of the inhabitants. He evicted every tenant farmer in the villages of Allindemagle and Valsølille and transformed their lands into two large estates, then reneged on his promise to establish crofts for the evicted tenants. They sued, the case went to the Supreme Court, but it was not decided until after the major's death.
The previous landlord, Countess Anna Joachimine Danneskjold Laurvigen, had built schools for her tenants, and in 1780, she had pledged that leases on the Skjoldenæsholm estate would be hereditary and that obligatory labor would be regulated "for all eternity." Major Bruun de Neergaard's failure to abide strictly by this pledge was another cause of unrest in his day. So was the intolerance of the judge of his manorial court.
In October of 1845, the major celebrated his fiftieth anniversary as owner of the estate by inviting all of its inhabitants and various local dignitaries, 1,081 people in all, to a great celebration held at Skjoldenæsholm and in the two villages. A few months later, the old major rode around the estate, village by village and farm by farm, inspecting everything and bidding farewell to each and every person. He retired to Copenhagen, where he died soon after.
By 1850, the census showed that the population of Jystrup parish had grown to 564 and Valsølille to 713. A new generation of Bruun de Neergaards lived in Skjoldenæsholm Manor with all their servants, and they still owned almost everything. Reform was in the air, but it was slow in coming. The village folks were beginning to look for something better. In the 1860's, people from Jystrup and Valsølille began to immigrate to America.
