Situated west of Lincoln, a little-known, cash-strapped university outpost spawns renowned work, serious awe

The year was 1974. It was early fall. Or was it late spring? Never mind all that, Gary Hergenrader says. It isn't the season he remembers today, but the site: the old campground across the water, a dozen red cabins clinging like ticks to the canyon walls, the lodge overlooking Keystone Lake, the geology exposed in the rocky shelves above.

Before retiring in 2005, Hergenrader served nearly 25 years as the Nebraska state forester. But back in 1974, he was a 34-year-old professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He studied lakes, not trees.

He remembers leading a small convoy to the Sandhills and seeing the old Girl Scout camp in the distance. He remembers the field station he once patronized as a graduate student in Wisconsin and the northern California field station where he taught his first limnology course. He remembers how those experiences colored that first big gulp of Cedar Point – how he dizzied with visions of a different use.

Squinting behind the wheel, he pictured his own students at UNL scurrying like ants among the cabins; collecting minnows and insects, soil and scat; breaking the routine of academia and immersing themselves in the field.

"What a wonderful place for teaching," he marveled aloud.

And then he proved it.

***

Next weekend, the Cedar Point Biological Station – roughly 260 miles west of UNL's city campus, and a world apart – will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Long operated on a shoestring budget and lesser known than many of the university's glossier assets, it has spawned groundbreaking research and bestselling books, novel architecture and soaring scientific careers.

It is the only true field station on America's High Plains, and fiercely – even lyrically – defended by students, faculty and alumni alike. To date, roughly 6,000 students have dusted its trails.

"Here no radio stations blare out the most recent results of meaningless sports events, few newspapers ever manage to find their way to this outpost of civilization, and no traffic noises confound the senses. Instead ... the leaves of the cottonwood trees convert its breezes into soft music," wrote the late Paul Johnsgard, a celebrated ornithologist and UNL professor.

Once roamed by great herds of bison and the Native American tribes who relied on them, the cedar-studded property was later homesteaded by a dentist named Silas Philo Gainsforth.

After pulling teeth in Montana and then in Holdrege, Gainsforth chased the cattle business to Keith County, where he filed a homestead claim in 1911 on Cedar Point, a cherished local landmark skirting the south shore of the North Platte River.

Gainsforth quickly gave up ranching and returned to his dental calling, but he kept the ranch and a hobby herd of whiteface cattle. He and wife Jessie allowed the public to fish and picnic at Cedar Point, if somewhat reluctantly. Careless visitors would often leave their trash behind, and sometimes harvest their Christmas trees, too.

Before his death in 1957, Gainsforth retired to the ranch. With his lakeside neighbor Robert Goodall, he sometimes imagined a scout camp blooming in the canyons. Their wives later realized their dream by establishing the only Girl Scout camp in western Nebraska. Mrs. Gainsforth donated a long-term lease of roughly 500 acres to the Guiding Star Girl Scout Council.

Mrs. Goodall gave $65,000.

The 40-acre campus opened in the summer of 1960.

***

By the time Hergenrader and his students drove past, the Girl Scout camp had folded. Hergenrader tested the waters back in Lincoln for a biological field station at Cedar Point. And when he was named interim director of the School of Life Sciences later that year, he dove all the way in, lobbying the administration.

"I was just so convinced it was the right thing to do," he says.

After listening to Hergenrader's pitch, John Janovy and Brent Nickol – both parasitologists – joined him on a single-engine plane chartered by the university and flew to Ogallala.

They toured the Goodall Lodge, the cabins, the pump house, the garage. The facilities were perfectly imperfect, they say. In March 1975, after they sold the administration on its academic merit, the NU Board of Regents approved a $4,800 annual lease. The camp would be known as the Cedar Point Biological Station.

Janovy taught at Cedar Point for 34 summers. Shortly after he began, he developed a new course called "field parasitology." Though Janovy retired in 2011, the course remains a staple in the summer catalog.

Picture 20 students in late July, he says. T-shirts and cutoffs. Sweat-stained ballcaps. Picture them dragging handheld nets through the mossy water of Dunwoody Pond. Picture them back in the lab at Cedar Point, beneath the Goodall Lodge, gently releasing their catch: hundreds of damselfly nymphs, six-legged and skinny as pencil lead, tail gills fanned like turkey feathers.

His students would spend hours dissecting larvae in search of the single-celled parasites within. Counting and sorting and diagnosing different species. After dinner, they'd work the math and the models. Janovy would ask, "What did we learn today?" He would explain how for the rest of their lives, directly or not, they'd be dealing with a simple question: How are infectious agents distributed in a population of hosts?

"That's a question that goes from fish in the South Platte River to damselflies in Dunwoody Pond to the COVID virus in the United States," he says.

Janovy twice served as director and stoked a literary career in the process. A magazine feature published in 1976 flowered into his first book, "Keith County Journal," two years later. Inspired by his time at the field station and the Sandhills beyond, the essay collection earned favorable reviews. The New York Times called it "A gracefully written, horizon-expanding book."

He vowed never to write a grant proposal again, instead authoring a number of books. All of those works and dozens more are the product, Janovy says, of "the richness of that whole environment, and the way that richness can be so easily exploited intellectually."

"I think Cedar Point symbolizes everything a biologist believes about planet Earth."

***

Five years after the regents signed the lease, the NU Foundation bought the property for $95,000. In 1996, the property was transferred to UNL.

Since then, the Nebraska Environmental Trust, National Science Foundation and others have awarded Cedar Point funding for various upgrades and additions, and the Gainsforth family has donated easement rights to 400 acres west of the camp.

But a decade of budget woes at the University of Nebraska has left the Cedar Point Biological Station stretched thin and short staffed, according to John DeLong, the current director.

"We're one large problem away from being in the hole. We have no buffer."

Operating Cedar Point alone is a roughly $380,000 annual endeavor. More than half is currently paid for by the field station's own revenue, primarily room and board. The remainder is cobbled together via a shrinking matrix of university funding.

"So the pinch point is that we have a sizable campus with 35 buildings, and sometimes well over 100 people on site, and we have no full-time, state-supported maintenance."

According to Mark Button, dean of UNL's College of Arts and Sciences, circumstances at Cedar Point reflect broader budget constraints across the university system. The college's state-aided budget – which includes state funding and tuition dollars – has shrunk by more than $9.7 million over the past four years.

In light of these pressures, Cedar Point has both increased its fundraising efforts and opened the gates to departments well beyond the biological sciences. This summer, it hosted courses in environmental literature, indigenous history and Zen philosophy. Architecture students have built new cabins from encroaching eastern redcedar trees, and student interns now assist with property maintenance and habitat management.

Artist Katie Nieland, associate director of UNL's Center for Great Plains Studies, is a beneficiary of the station's broadening horizons. She'd been stewing at the intersection of art and science for years. When she saw a posting for the artist-in-residence program at Cedar Point, she jumped at the opportunity.

In the summer of 2021 she loaded her supplies and headed west for a week-long retreat. But Google Maps didn't guide her up Highway 61; it took her down the backroads to a locked gate. The road was narrow. The cedars were dark. Her cell service was scrambled. The flies were biting.

"I started to panic a little and went to turn my car around when John Janovy pulled up," she says. "What a great coincidence to be rescued by the author of 'Keith County Journal' himself."

At the cabin, she sketched out the scene of her rescue: the road, the gate, the tree. She itched, at first, detoxing from her life back in Lincoln, skeptical of her sudden freedom. No texts. No emails. But then she found her rhythm, and then, she says, she found her awe.

"When you finally get to the top of the hill ... you're like, 'Oh, I get it. I get this place, and I get why it's important,'" she says. "And I really hope that Cedar Point is around in another 50 years, because it is an incredible place both for students and faculty to connect with their subject matter."

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