THE REAL JENNY JUMP

by Atticus Gannaway

Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 47, no. 3 (Winter 2003), pgs. 19–21

Citations

Chicago 17th ed.:

Gannaway, Atticus. “The Real Jenny Jump.” Baum Bugle 47, no. 3 (2003): 19–21.

MLA 9th ed.:

Gannaway, Atticus. “The Real Jenny Jump.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 47, no. 3, 2003, pp. 19–21.

(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with images that have not been reproduced here.)

Sixty miles west of teeming Manhattan, in a verdant region far beyond the rusting corpses of urban industry that prompt many New Yorkers to snicker at the nickname “Garden State,” is the sleepy town of Hope, New Jersey. Just before exit 12 to Hope, off westbound I-80, a sign matter-of-factly announces “Land of Make Believe.” The disconnect between banal highway driving and the implication of fairyland is momentarily jarring. In reality, the Land of Make Believe is a local amusement park, but it still seems somehow fitting that a piece of Oz lies nearby. 

Past the main part of town and between two pastures is a road with a direction sign: “Jenny Jump State Forest.” In the near distance sits Jenny Jump Mountain, a modest peak that the road spools around like gray thread in its climb toward the summit—a bucolic image on an overcast afternoon in autumn.

It is easy to see how such scenery must have inspired John R. Neill, who immortalized the mountain in his first novel, The Wonder City of Oz (1940), when he created Jenny Jump. Although Neill is justifiably considered more of an artist than a writer, Jenny Jump remains his most indelible, complex, and satisfying invention, first and foremost because she exudes vivacity from the very first lines of Neill’s debut novel: “Jenny Jump jumped. She was so surprised, she jumped halfway across the kitchen!”[1]

Neill’s writing is often criticized for its overabundance of incident at the expense of character development and plot. (Eloise Jarvis McGraw once joked that she and her daughter, Lauren McGraw, decided to write Merry Go Round in Oz [1963] because anything they could produce had to be better than Neill’s sophomore effort, The Scalawagons of Oz [1941].) But this weakness can also be viewed as a strength: the texts of these novels are memorable primarily for their tempestuous, illogical, hither-and-thither quality. Nowhere is this embodied more firmly than in the character of Jenny Jump, who is frequently rude to a fault and whose impetuousness leads her to run an election campaign against Ozma before wreaking havoc in the Emerald City. This is an Oz in which shoes sing and breeches whistle—just because they can. And Jenny proudly leads the dizzying anarchic parade.

In his letter to the children in Wonder City, addressed from his country home Endolane in Flanders (twenty miles east of Hope), Neill firmly establishes the link between his fiery heroine and his geographic surroundings: “It all came about when I discovered that Jenny Jump had lived on the next mountain top to ours. We live on top of the Schooley Mountains and the Jenny Jump Mountains are really truly mountains right next to us. They are wonderful mountains for fairies to hide in.”[2]

Along the winding mountain road, there is indeed a sense that civilization has not fully taken hold, that Jenny’s leprechaun friend Siko Pompus (or, to use Neill’s preferred spelling, Psychopompus) might easily find a towering tree to lurk behind. 

Not far from the shadowy boundary of the state forest is the clearing where the small park office stands. In the office, information is available that provides a possible explanation for the origin of the mountain’s name. A pamphlet from the New Jersey Division of Parks and Forestry gives a speculative account under the headline “The Legend of Jenny Jump”: “Perhaps entirely myth, perhaps based on some fact, the legend was recorded by Swedish missionary Sven Roseen in 1747. According to the legend, Jenny, who was gathering berries, jumped off the ridge when her father saw Indians approaching and yelled to her to jump. Some versions say she died, others that she survived. However, it is also possible that the name ‘Jenny Jump’ is the anglicized version of a Lenape name of the mountain and that the legend sprung up to explain it afterwards.”[3]

A couple of hundred yards from park headquarters is the base of the Summit Trail to the top of Jenny Jump Mountain. It is a short, easy climb made easier by the brisk October air. An abundance of evergreens lends a ring of truth to Neill’s terse description of Jenny “sailing over the pine trees on top of the mountain” as she uses her newly found magic powers.[4] The foliage is thinning already as the year wanes, but hardy flowering plants still line the path. The image of a pioneer girl flinging herself out of a tribe’s reach, scarlet berries scattering like embers, is not difficult to conjure. Like Neill’s Oz, things here are more sentient than they first appear.

The brief ascent on foot is deceptive; the route by car to the trail’s base is a gradual incline that begins between the two pastures back at the main road, and, after rustling through the bushes at the edge of the mountain, one can take in a lightly misted panorama spread out eleven hundred feet below. There are the Highlands, and the Kittatinny Mountains, and the gently sloping Great Meadows shaped by the same glaciers that carved out Jenny Jump Mountain twenty-one thousand years ago, at the close of the Wisconsin Ice Age. A harsh red barn in the distance overlooks geometric tracts of farmland, spread like postage stamps on the green blotter of a philatelist’s desk. 

Such a painterly view makes one wonder what sort of inspiration Neill might have derived from standing on this same peak. Perhaps he was speaking through Jenny Jump, picturing the simple beauty of this rural region in the eye of his mind, when his character first sees Oz from her magical approach through the air: “‘That looks like a land of enchantment,’ she said. ‘I can see it with my magic eye, but not with my ordinary one.’”[5]

This speech, however, was not quite Neill’s sentiment—for he could see the land with both.

(Special thanks to Jim and Laika Hoffman.)

 

Notes

[1] The Wonder City of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1940), 17.

[2] Wonder City, [13].

[3] State Park Service, New Jersey Division of Parks and Forestry, Jenny Jump State Forest, n.d.

[4] Wonder City, 23.

[5] Wonder City, 24.

Authors of articles from The Baum Bugle that are reprinted on the Oz Club’s website retain all rights. All other website contents Copyright © 2026 The International Wizard of Oz Club, Inc. All Rights Reserved.