Ada Hayden: Iowa Time Machine August 12, 1950

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On August 12, 1950, Iowa conservationist Ada Hayden passed away. A botanist, teacher, and preservationist from Ames, Hayden recognized that Iowa’s original grasslands were disappearing beneath the plow long before many people treated their loss as a public concern.

Born near Ames on August 14, 1884, she was encouraged by Iowa State botanist Louis H. Pammel to pursue the study of plants. She earned a botany degree at Iowa State College in 1908, completed a master’s degree at Washington University in St. Louis in 1910, returned to Iowa State in 1911, and became the first woman to earn a doctorate there in 1918. Her achievement also made her the fourth person, regardless of gender, to receive a Ph.D. from the college, a remarkable milestone for a woman scientist in the early twentieth century.

Hayden built her career at Iowa State through teaching, research, and curatorial labor. As curator of the Iowa State Herbarium from 1934 until her death, she helped develop a collection whose plant specimens preserved evidence of species, habitats, and landscapes that industrial agriculture was rapidly altering. Her concern for prairie conservation appeared publicly in her 1919 essay, “Conservation of Prairie,” and became a sustained campaign in the 1940s. Working with John M. Aikman and the Iowa Academy of Science, she directed the Prairie Project, surveyed surviving prairie remnants, and published a 1945 report identifying areas worthy of protection. Her investigation of the Howard County tract near Lime Springs helped lead to its purchase by the Iowa Conservation Commission in 1945; after her death, it was named Hayden Prairie in her honor.

Hayden Prairie State Preserve still protects 240 acres in northern Howard County and contains more than 200 plant species, making it the largest prairie in Iowa outside the Loess Hills. Her name also endures at Iowa State through the Ada Hayden Herbarium, now a research collection of more than 660,000 specimens used to study plant diversity, distribution, and environmental change. In Ames, Ada Hayden Heritage Park connects her memory to public recreation and wetland conservation. #Iowa #OTD #History #Conservation #Botany