Ada Hayden Rock

This marker remembers Ada Hayden, the first woman ever to earn a doctorate at Iowa State College. She received that degree in botany in nineteen eighteen, in an age when women scientists were rare and often unwelcome. Over her career she gathered more than forty thousand plant specimens for the college herbarium, which now carries her name.

But Hayden is remembered most for what she fought to save. Iowa had once been an ocean of tallgrass prairie, and by her lifetime almost all of it had been plowed under. She campaigned tirelessly to protect the last surviving fragments. Near the end of her life, the state finally purchased prairie as a preserve. Shortly after she died in nineteen fifty, the two hundred forty acre preserve in Howard County was named the Ada Hayden Prairie, a living thank you to the woman who would not let Iowa forget what it had been.