Stone honoring wheat scientist planted again on WSU campus

PULLMAN — A memorial to William Jasper Spillman, a pioneering scientist, wheat breeder and college football coach, is back in a place of honor on the Washington State University campus.

A stone bearing Spillman's name has been returned to WSU after more than four decades on a research farm. A weekend ceremony rededicating the marker recalled the only man whose ashes were scattered on the campus.

"It's rare to have your ashes spread on any college campus," said Steve Jones, WSU's current wheat breeder, who pushed for new recognition for Spillman. "It's probably illegal now."

Spillman was hired in 1894, the sixth member of the faculty. A geneticist, his job was to create wheat varieties that would resist disease and thrive in the state's climate.

His first varieties were released in 1905, and their legacy continues today, Jones said.

"They were grown for more than 50 years, and the genes from those varieties can be found in the pedigrees of today's wheats," Jones said.

Spillman stayed in Pullman for just seven years, but his accomplishments were many.

He was the only American scientist to independently rediscover Mendel's lost law of heredity, which described how traits are passed on genetically, Jones said.

He also created the framework for agriculture extension, the process by which university research findings are distributed to farmers. As a federal employee later, he hired the first 400 county agents in the U.S., Jones said.

Recognized as the founder of agricultural economics, Spillman contended farmers would do better to diversify and rotate crops, rather than depend on ever-increasing mechanization and chemicals to make money.

As editor of Farm Journal, he criticized the U.S. Agriculture Department's move to depopulate the countryside through agricultural industrialization. He took this message of sustainable agriculture across the country, 80 years before it became popular.

Less well known is that he served as an assistant coach to Washington State's first football team, known as the Farmers, in 1894, Jones said.

Spillman died in 1931. His son Ramsay, a New York doctor, came to Pullman in 1934 with his father's ashes and spread them over the area of his agriculture test plots at the center of campus.

Spillman's widow, Mattie, died in 1935 and her ashes were spread over Spillman's.

A large granite stone was bought with donations and dedicated in 1940.

By the late 1950s, construction of the new agronomy building began and the stone was moved to a quiet corner away from bulldozers. In 1960, it was moved off campus to the research farm, renamed Spillman Farm.

A push began in more recent times to bring the stone back to campus, and it was returned last March, Jones said.