ABSTRACT
One day in 1974, Roger Macklem, a graduate student in secondary education at the University of Nebraska went to a teacher’s workshop hosted by Doane College. Doane is a small Methodist liberal arts school in Crete, Nebraska, and the Doane administration had a close relationship with one of its wealthy alumna, a Mrs. Robert (Clarice) Goodall. Although she couldn’t have known it at the time, Mrs. Goodall had something years earlier that would figure prominently in the development of Eden. The teacher’s workshop was held at a former, and vacant, Girl Scout camp north of Ogallala, Nebraska. Roger Macklem was also enrolled in a limnology course taught by Dr. Gary Hergenrader, a young faculty member at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Roger told Hergenrader about this Girl Scout camp, built into the scenic bluffs along the south shore of Lake Keystone, a wide place in the North Platte River, created by an irrigation diversion dam. Hergenrader contacted Myrna and Burdett Gainsforth, the Ogallala couple whose family had originally donated the land for Cedar Point Camp, asked if he could inspect the place. He subsequently arranged for D.B.(Woody) Varner, then chancellor, Max Larsen, Dean of Arts and Sciences, and Mike Daly, Director of the School of Biological Sciences, to meet with
the Gainsforths and talk about leasing the facilities for use as a biological station. Gary Hergenrader was part of a group of young faculty members who had spent time in field programs during their graduate student days, and knew from firsthand experience the value of field courses. Within a few months UNL had leased Cedar Point for five years for the purpose of starting a similar program, and one of the most visionary, grand, pedagogical adventures the university had ever attempted was under way. What Gary Hergenrader needed most, however, were some faculty volunteers and a few students. In accordance with the now-famous movie line about people coming if you build something, both teachers and a courageous group of students appeared. The first faculty members who volunteered to staff Cedar Point were flown in a small plane out to western Nebraska, then driven north by Myrna Gainsforth to inspect the place. It was March, the bleakest time in the northern Great Plains. We took a tour of the buildings, then chose our housing, seeing only potential and not the immediate reality. Later, in June, when our wives saw the place for the first time, some cringed and others cried. Before that first summer was over, however, everyone was hooked. The end-of-summer tears became known as the Ogallala Blues.
