WSU pioneer gains presence on campus

PULLMAN – William Spillman would be high on any list of Washington State University pioneers.His wheat varieties cover the Palouse. He helped revolutionize scientific understanding of heredity and genetic traits, and he brought practical lab results to the farm. He was the fifth faculty member hired, and he started the school’s longest-running program, in wheat breeding.

His story includes a stint as the university’s self-taught football coach, work on a national survey of tribes, and helping to create the extension program. “It’s spectacular,” said Stephen Jones, a WSU wheat breeder and professor.

That’s why Jones could never understand Spillman’s unspectacular presence on campus.

A granite stone, reading “Spillman,” sits on a cracked concrete pad beside a gravel road at the WSU farm named in his honor. Nearby sits a Dumpster and an equipment barn. On campus, a brass plaque perpetuates a myth about where his ashes were scattered.

“That is what always drove me nuts,” Jones said last week, pointing to the plaque in Johnson Hall.

Jones began trying to get the memorial moved about 10 years ago, proposing three times that the Spillman stone be brought to campus and placed more prominently. Those requests never went anywhere, victim to other priorities.

But Jones took another crack at it in November. A couple of weeks ago, WSU President V. Lane Rawlins approved it. By spring, an expanded Spillman Memorial is expected to be in place on campus.

“It’s great,” Jones said. “Best news in a long time.”

The memorial decision comes at a particularly Spillmanesque moment. A century ago, the first of his wheat varieties was released to the public – an ancestor of most wheat varieties now grown on the Palouse. Fifty years ago, the school’s agricultural farm was started, named in his honor. And this year, a new biography written by Eastern Washington University professor Laurie Winn Carlson, “William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural Education” was released.

“I think everything came together on this last attempt,” Jones said.

Farmers’ Moses

The range of Spillman’s achievements is remarkable.

He was one of four scientists who repeated the long-forgotten research into genes and heredity by Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, finding that genetic traits were distinct and predictable, not blended together over generations. The rediscovery and renewed focus on Mendel’s Laws launched the study of genetics and laid the foundation for further work in evolutionary science.

Jones estimates that 90 percent of all wheat now grown on the Palouse traces its pedigrees to Spillman varieties. Spillman had a faith in science and observation, but he was known as a farmer’s scientist, who believed that most farmers just needed more access to information from the most successful farmers already at work, according to the new Spillman biography.

His archived papers at WSU include a huge collection of carbon copies of letters he sent to farmers around the region, answering questions about hogs and cheese and hairy vetch. A former Washington State college president, Enoch Bryan, said at Spillman’s funeral that he “was often looked upon (by farmers) as a Moses who might lead them out of the wilderness.”

Spillman came to the Washington State Agricultural College in 1894. He agreed to coach the football team – and had two undefeated seasons though he only learned about the sport beforehand by reading a book, Jones said.

Palouse wheat farmers at the time were struggling. They were growing varieties more suited to Oregon and California, and the shorter growing season here wreaked havoc with the crops. Spillman and his students began cross-pollinating wheat varieties, looking to make them more winter-hardy and to reduce the “shatter” of seed heads.

It was a ripe time for the field of genetics and heredity. During the preceding century, scientists had been mystified by how traits were inherited – many believed that an individual’s traits were the result of the unpredictable blending of the traits of his or her parents. In his famous experiments with pea plants, Mendel demonstrated that traits did not blend – that each parent’s genetic contribution stayed distinct and that the heredity of traits could be predicted.

“He de-mystified heredity,” Jones said.

It was a rather quiet de-mystification for 35 years or so. After Mendel died in 1884, his papers were burned and his theories largely forgotten until the turn of the century. At that point, three European scientists and Spillman began to reproduce the effects found in Mendel’s experiments.

In 1905, a new hard white winter wheat was released to area growers. Within six years, Spillman’s varieties were grown on about half a million acres. Today, farmers in the Palouse grow more than 20 varieties, with the top three making up most wheat.

“All of those wheats trace back in their pedigree to Spillman varieties,” Jones said.

‘Modernizer and critic’

Spillman’s time at WSU was fairly short. He left in 1901 to work in the booming Department of Agriculture, and over time he helped develop the model for the agricultural extension service and hired the first 400 agents. The new Spillman biography refers to him as a “farm evangelist” – always trying through magazines, research or lectures to pass along the best scientific principles to farmers.

There was an irony to the success of Spillman’s hybrid wheat program at WSU. His new varieties were tougher in weather and less prone to shatter, and soon wheat was booming again on the Palouse.

But Spillman was a dedicated advocate of diversification, and when he returned to the Palouse for a tour in 1924, he urged farmers to grow less wheat and raise livestock and other crops. One of his latest ideas was the federal program of linking farm subsidies to limited production.

“He really wasn’t in favor of farmers growing a lot of wheat,” Carlson said. “The rest of his life was dedicated to resolving the problems of overproduction.”

‘Piece of granite’

Jones came to WSU in 1992. He was interested in Spillman because they shared the same job, and he began looking into the state of his legacy at WSU.

The granite Spillman memorial at the wheat plot had originally been placed on a hill on campus in 1940, at the site of the current Johnson Hall, Jones said – that’s also where Spillman’s and his wife’s ashes had been scattered a few years earlier, despite the plaque’s assertion that the ashes were cast at the Spillman farm. The stone was moved to the farm in 1960, where it sits without explanation.

“It’s just a piece of granite on the side of a hill with the word Spillman on it,” said Pete Jacoby, associate dean for administration and planning, College of Agriculture, Human and Natural Resource Sciences.

The new memorial will be placed in a courtyard between Johnson Hall and Hulbert Hall. A 40-by-42-foot area will include the stone, signs with information about his achievements, benches and other landscaping, and stalks of Spillman wheat.

The stone will likely be moved to the site this fall, with the rest of the work done by spring. Jones said it should come in at $10,000 or less – “fairly low for what the result will be and the importance of it,” he said.

“It’s bringing that name back to campus.”