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Prairie Dog Holes: Rachel Lloyd, Beyond the Laboratory · Rooted in the Plains

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to Rooted in the Plains.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is Nicole, and I'm here with Mark Greep.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna do the first ever Rooted in the Plains.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: I've been playing with a name with like a little name.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking like prairie dog holes, kind of like rabbit holes, but it's the plains.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: So why would we call it rabbit holes?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's prairie dog holes, right?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: So um we just finished listening because that's what we did, right?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: We finished listening to the episode talking about Rachel Lloyd and the sugar school.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and he explained all about the chemistry behind that.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna finish talking a little bit more about that, and he's gonna just explain all the fun chemistry behind it, and we're just gonna kind of have a fun little chat about all the things that happened outside of um the little part that we discussed in the episode.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no problem.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, what did you want to hear her life story or city of Nebraska?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, let's talk about things outside of the episode.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, okay, so we've already talked about kind of how she got here and the little introduction of the pieces that happened while she was at Nebraska.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so what other fun things can you think of that would just kind of explore beyond our little introduction that we had?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so my impression is the very first year she didn't do any research, she got everything set up.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: So she probably ordered lots of equipment.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: It came in, and um those saccharometers that we talked about, I think those came in during the second year that she was here.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: But her first year she mostly taught.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And um you can imagine that having this woman uh scientist um lecture in your classroom, well, she was very popular.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um she was a very nice person, apparently, and she had a very sophisticated way about her.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: I bet.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she was brought up a Quaker, and it's possible that she used the and thou when she spoke, but she had left the Quaker faith during the Civil War because she felt you needed to do something to prevent that from happening.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so she may have lost that, but she had the accent, the quaint, sophisticated accent, at least to Nebraska prairie ears.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's always fun to hear a different accent here.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: We don't always get that, although I feel like maybe at that time you probably would have still had some accents from different places as people were still making that transition and migrating from the East Coast to the center here.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was mostly um Ohio and um, you know, the the Midwest, the old Midwest.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't really uh East Coast folk.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't really New Englanders, it was farmers that came here to farm.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or to start a business in Lincoln.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln had a lot of business.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, because we had just grown.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: We were just, we were on that, we were on that edge of growing.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: 1880s was a boom time in Lincoln.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: And she got here at that time.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the campus was only four city blocks.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: But um when she arrived, there were two buildings on campus, Old Maine and the Chemical Laboratory.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So a building dedicated to chemistry.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when she moved into an apartment, she moved in right next door to the chemical laboratory, right across the street.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: So all she had to do was go out her door and then in the door of the chemical laboratory up two flights, and she'd find her office.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's like the dream for most professors, right?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Professors want parking.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so that's the first year.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: The second year, though, she did a lot of the analysis of the sugar beets that were grown in Grand Island because Hudson Nicholson, the chair, had already had some relationship with those folks.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he had gotten beets, seeds from the USDA and had brought them out to Grand Island.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um so they tested a lot of different varieties of beets.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the ones from the USDA didn't weren't the ones that really did the best.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there were a number of them that were pretty good.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And her analysis showed that the vast majority of them had more than 12% sucrose.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And 12% sucrose was the industrial cutoff.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you have more than that, you can justify building a plant.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the beauty of having a plant is two things.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: One, the farmers have a place to bring their produce and get money really quickly, but then the farmers during the winter season they can work at the factory and process their own beets or they process for the company.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but they get paid twice.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's a really nice system.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so Grand Island, uh, a lot of businessmen there uh working with the local German immigrant farmers.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: There were a lot of German immigrants out there, um, and they actually had come from the beet growing regions of Germany.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: So they knew how to grow.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's why everything was just go, go, go, right.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when they built that plant in Grand Island in uh 1891, um, it was the third sugar beet plant in the nation.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: The first two were in California, and within 10 years, the two in California had closed.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: So this was quickly the oldest sugar beet processing plant in the nation.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it lasted till the 1960s.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason they built it was because of Rachel Lloyd's analysis saying there's sufficient quantity of sugar in here to justify that factory.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most successful factories ever.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I I should ask more questions to, well, to an employee that I just found out who retired in the last year, worked there.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, not, I mean, I don't know when he worked there, but he worked there somewhere in his life.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Worked in one of them out on the western part of Nebraska.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Scott's bluffer, one of the others.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so, but yeah, he recently was one of our one of the facility workers here at the university.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, but he just retired in the last year.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've visited that plant as well.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and my wife and I, we drove a whole perimeter around the building because that building was reconstructed from the one in Fremont.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, it's Nicole.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: We interrupt this program for a brief technical difficulty.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently, my SD car decided to go exploring on its own.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: So if our conversation seems to take a little detour, that's why.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now back to Mark.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: There, they actually used beets grown by farmers near Norfolk because there was not enough people growing it near Ames.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what they quickly found was that the farmers also felt they could get more money with corn, but it also rained.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: So a root vegetable in the rain isn't good.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so the yields were poor.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Just it was a failure.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: So very soon, um, after they built it, so 1906, the owner started looking for a better place to build this plant.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how the Scotts Bluff plant got chosen.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: It for a while it might have been North Platte, but Scotts Bluff won out.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Probably because there were businessmen there who said we would help pay.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's quite a few different ones out there.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, so it's a little bit drier, with it being the sand hills.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, it is drier.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: And sandier soil.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, which, you know, I mean, there are people that that don't realize that Nebraska has quite the varied um climates and conditions.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the eastern third is forest.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: It gets drier and drier as you go with.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's like it's just it's quite it's quite the interesting state if you've if you've not lived here before and have traveled, traveled through it, it you know, you it looks kind of boring, um, but it's quite the different place from one side to the other.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you've got different growing conditions, which was also quite the thing while um the sugar school was was studying it because you've got different conditions that you've got to deal with.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: So how do you research that?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: So um first year she analyzed the beets grown in Grand Island.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Second year, um, Hudson Nicholson and a graduate student had brought beet seeds across the state.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the Union Pacific gave them free passage to bring all these beets to all these farmers.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: She then analyzed all these beets.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think this is the famous 700 beet samples, and then made a map of Nebraska with circles.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: The bigger the circle, the higher the sucrose content.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And basically everywhere they were grown, except for maybe 10.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they were huge circles.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you could justify building a plant anywhere.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe not as much over here since they kind of started.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't know that at the time, right?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a farmer, you know that uh everything is different from year to year.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's true.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's true.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Making scientific decisions about where to farm, that's a tough one too.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because as you say, growing conditions, uh, weeding, right, everything.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, in one year it can be a drought.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and even at the beginning of a season it can be a drought, and at the end it can be the opposite, and vice versa, and in the middle, and all the things, and you can have a flood at the end of the winter, like we had a few years ago, and it can be dry, and you never know quite know what you're gonna get into.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, and and then one funny thing happened.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I'm sure they gave instructions, you know, grow them only to a certain size.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the farmers felt the bigger the beat, the better.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out the bigger the beat, the better, the more wood.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't, it's not sugar.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: So she received a lot of these really huge beats, and I'm sure the farmers were proud, but they were low sucrose content.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, those were the ones that had the low sucrose.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but they were probably like a I mean, I can I can just picture the texture.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how to quite describe that, but I'm just what that would look like.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, kind of grainy almost, but not that kind of grainy.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but just not quite what you would want for that, and it's probably drier.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: They started using irrigation with them because of the sandier soil, um, which when I was looking into the different pictures, and that's how I found a whole bunch of other things that kind of were interesting.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then there was um when we were talking earlier, so yeah, he was a hist you said geography professor.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so a George Condra, he was taking photographs across the state of different things and writing reports.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and he actually I found photos.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: So those will probably be part of um Instagram and on the website of the irrigation of these beats, how they did that.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that was really interesting.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: How they set that up.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it just looks like they kind of created some troughs in between them and it I don't know if it's like a board.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it looks like it looks like a piece of wood that they just look like a piece of wood.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um like just kind of cut it off like a little dam and flooded it out.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I was like, okay, that's a way to do it.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely not the way that we do it now with a with a center pivot or any of those types of things.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, keep in mind that's a hundred and some almost 130 years ago.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: So center pivots didn't really take off until after World War II.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we've got to come up with our own ways of of irrigating things, and but yeah, it's quite was quite interesting.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: So and so yeah, um, then um it was that burst of three years of analyzing beets in a seven-year career.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: In the fourth year, she created a whole course on sugar.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was titled Sugar.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: I believe there were 35 students who signed up for this class, which is phenomenal.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was such a buzz.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sugar beets.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody wanted to know what the story was.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: But she was very comprehensive, right?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: The physics of sugar, the physics of light to use to analyze certain things about the sucrose content, how to use saccharometers, um, how to grow beets, how to harvest beets, how do you extract the sucrose from the beets industrially.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and if you're an analytical chemist at one of these factories, what do you do?
• 13:12
  unknown: Right.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: So an amazing course.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the second year it was taught by a whole slew of faculty, um, because by this time she had had a heart attack or a stroke.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not a heart attack, a stroke.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it would it was taken over, and that's when they called it a sugar school.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then it got written up in Science Magazine.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Which, yeah, that was so cool.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's and that's kind of how I found this whole thing.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's the funny part, is that I was looking up um articles as I as I do for every episode, and I came across um the sugar school, and it listed um a brace, which is now a building here on campus that um that we see.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh, that's familiar.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was like, I wonder who these other professors are that are a part of this.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: And the re the the prairie dog hole that we go down.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I came across Rachel Lloyd, and um, and then that tied me back to Mark Greep that I met this spring.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what that's how we are here.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is kind of crazy, but yeah.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is crazy.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: So then she had her stroke, she actually tried to retire, um, but then the chair wouldn't let her.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And all the other faculty loved her too.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they kept her on, they gave her an assistant, a young undergraduate named Mary Fossler, who ended up getting a bachelor's and master's in the department and becoming the third woman chemistry professor in the department.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: But then in her fifth year, even though you know she was debilitated, couldn't use her arm very well, um, she was planning to offer a history of chemistry course.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: She's totally after my heart.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then at the end of the fifth year, uh seventh year, she finally did retire.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: But she actually didn't.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: She ended up going to a private school in Wisconsin, a very progressive undergraduate school, uh preparatory school.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And she was there one year.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: But there she brought um chemistry lab experiments to these high school age kids.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I'm sure that that whole concept was just really hard for her to like after all of that and just after an amazing long career as an educator.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's just crazy.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it was just amazing you can come up with sugar from this root vegetable.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, other versions of it, people are like, this is a gross vegetable.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that attractive.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, anything else you want to add?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um another fun thing is when she actually did die in um 1900.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um Willa Cather was the editor of the Hesperian student newspaper, and she wrote a very wonderful obituary.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you might want to put the text in.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I will have to do that.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: I will I I know I have I and I know I have it.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: I have it in my research.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: I found that and I thought that that was it was really beautiful and very fitting.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we have lots of little ties to Willow Cather anyway.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: So Well, I'm sure you do.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: So well, thank you very much again, and we all will um be now inspired by the sugar beet, I think.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.