Blichfeldt was one of five children of a Danish farming couple, Erhard Christoffer Laurentius Blichfeldt and Nielsine Maria Schlaper; many of his father's ancestors were ministers. He was born on January 9, 1873, in Iller, a village in the Sønderborg Municipality of Denmark. In 1881, the family moved to Copenhagen. In 1888, he passed with high honors the entrance examinations for the University of Copenhagen, but his family was unable to afford sending him to the university. Instead, later the same year, they moved again to the US. He worked for several years as a lumberman, a railway worker, a traveling surveyor, and then as a government draftsman in Bellingham, Washington.
