Greenbelt properties are often donated by people who have led noteworthy lives. Such is the story of the Reinert Reservation located off Route 133 in Essex.
The 36 acres of land and 18 acres of salt marsh were gifted to Greenbelt in 1989 by the estate of Elsie Jansen Reinert, who graduated from George Washington University Law School only to give up law for a life on the sea.
Elsie Bradford Jansen was a lieutenant in the Coast Guard when she was profiled by the Honolulu Advertiser in 1946 with a photo, and what is now a cringe-worthy headline, “Girl Lawyer Sails 7 Seas As Ship Crew Member.”
Jansen passed the Massachusetts Bar examination with high honors, but practiced only briefly, drawn to a seafaring career she said was inspired by “a great-grandfather who sailed the seven seas and left behind him logbooks teeming with high adventure.”
“In New York, I ran across Tramp Trips, Inc., which was just launching the idea that people would like to travel by freighter,” Reinert told the newspaper. She would then travel the globe, becoming an authority on how to get to any port in the world on cargo ships.
In 1939, she went to South Africa, India, the Philippines, as well as the Dutch East Indies. “I took a winter off to sail as an ordinary seaman on the three-masted square rigged Joseph Conrad,” she said in the 1946 article.
She found herself in Antofagasta, Chile, when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. Returning to the United States, she went to work for the American Merchant Marine Institute to publicize the work merchant mariners were doing in World War II.
She joined the Coast Guard in 1943, and in Hawaii was part of the detail responsible for port security.
Jansen later married Frederick Faraday Reinert, an artist known for landscape and marine paintings. She was born in 1907 and died in 1988.
The Reinert Reservation borders an upland hayfield and coastal forest, as well as Soginese Creek. It has been classified by the state as a core habitat for Species of Special Concern, including the common tern.