Distilling 150 years of Oregon State University’s rich history into a one-hour documentary was one of the hardest projects that “Oregon Experience” writer and producer Kami Horton has tackled since the documentary series program launched in 2006.

“I was a little worried when I looked into this because I knew there was a lot of history,” Horton said. “But far more than I even realized. That was really the challenge: How to get 150 years into 60 minutes and make it interesting and have a story arch.”

Horton will present the one-hour documentary, “Oregon State University,” 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Tower Theatre. The documentary was co-produced by OPB and the Oregon Historical Society.

OSU was established seven years before the University of Oregon. With more than 31,000 students, OSU is the state’s largest university and one of two institutions nationwide with Land-, Sea-, Space- and Sun-Grant designations.

While researching the “Oregon Experience” show, Horton accessed OSU’s archives of more than 1 million historic images. There are also mounds of film footage that date back to near the school’s founding in 1868.

“I gathered everything I thought might be useful,” said Horton. “It’s a matter of getting the best images to tell the story.”

Horton had the help, however, of two historians whose recently published books on OSU history served as the guide wires in her archival deep dives.

Larry Landis, the director of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center at OSU Libraries and Press, wrote “A School for the People: A Photographic History of Oregon State University” in 2015; and Dr. William Robbins, emeritus distinguished professor of history at OSU, was also invaluable, Horton said. Robbins’ book, “The People’s School: A History of Oregon State University,” published by Oregon State University Libraries and Press last year, provided the framework for the documentary.

“They had already done all the legwork, all the research, so it was just a matter of trying to figure out how to piece that together in an interesting way,” Horton said.

Horton also spent a lot of time sorting through Landis’ archives at the Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections & Archives Research Center, which he directs. On-camera interactions with Landis provide the narrative thread for the documentary, Horton said.

“That allows us to tell the history and also go back and forth in time rather than just go strictly chronological,” she added.

Horton gravitated toward people’s faces when selecting images.

“The large plate photography from the 1880s (through) the turn of the century captures people’s faces really beautifully,” she said. “You can really get into them.”

Landis agrees. In 1891, OSU was one of the first universities in the country to teach photography.

“As a result, we have a long body of photographic documentation, which was a boon to my research,” Landis said in the documentary.

One relatively modern black-and-white image, however, is also exceptional. In it, an OSU basketball player blocks an opponent’s shot. It’s one of the most-celebrated images in OSU sports, Landis said. The photo was taken by Chris Johns, who graduated from OSU in 1974 and later became the editor-in-chief of National Geographic.

“Things like that are really good images that allow us to get into the story,” Horton said.

Growing pains

While the “Oregon Experience” episode highlights OSU’s many contributions to fields like agriculture and engineering, Horton and her cohorts didn’t shy from controversy in illustrating the time it took for “The People’s School” to attain the equality it champions today.

In 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed federal legislation to create land-grant schools in each state, which would serve to provide low-cost instruction in agriculture, military tactics and engineering. The Oregon Legislature gave that designation to Corvallis College (OSU) in 1868.

The historic decision, Horton said, was swayed by a Southern-sympathizing senator from Benton County. The college was operated by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, a religious sect comprised of Southerners who were some of the first white settlers of the Oregon Territory, Horton said. Many of them fought with the Confederacy. These political leanings colored OSU’s early campus, she added. For example, the uniforms that were worn during men’s mandatory military training was Confederate gray, the documentary points out.

“That’s an important part of the history that we absolutely had to talk about,” Horton said.

Other volatile periods include the black student walkout of 1969, when head football coach Dee Andros made a black football player chose between shaving his facial hair — even though it was during the off-season — or losing his scholarship. He decided not to shave. Many black students walked out and many did not return. Thousands of students showed support for Andros, according to OSU records.

“That went on to affect the football team for years because they couldn’t recruit black athletes,” Horton said.

Robbins said he was untroubled by unearthing less than flattering aspects of OSU, particularly racial and gender-related growing pains. He deals with them at length in his book, “The People’s School.”

“I’m a historian,” Robbins said. “You go where the documents, where the facts, take you.”

‘The People’s School’

The documentary also focuses on the innovation that has percolated throughout the university. For example, OSU labs developed the maraschino cherry, marionberry and seaweed that tastes like bacon, according to the documentary. Cascade hops were genetically tweaked, too, influencing the way beer is brewed.

Throughout its early decades, OSU experienced a revolving list of unofficial names: Corvallis College, Agricultural College of the State of Oregon, State Agricultural College, Corvallis Agricultural College.

The school colors, orange and black, were adopted around 1892. The school teams were first called the Beavers in 1908. The marching band, established in 1891, is the oldest in the Pac-12, according to the documentary.

In the early 20th century, OSU launched a series of exhibits and two-day seminars that would visit rural Oregon via railroad, turning train cars into classrooms. The goal was to deliver information from the laboratories and classrooms to the public. In 1914, the federally-funded OSU Extension Service was founded. Today, an OSU Extension Service office is located in every Oregon county.

Horton glimpsed some of her favorite moments of OSU’s history in film footage from the 1920s. In one long film, students played a game called pushball — a hybrid between soccer and football involving a 6-foot ball. Other films show students engaging in tug-of-war games.

“There are lots of pranks,” Horton said. “Lots of things done to freshmen, the ‘rooks.’”

Also included in the video are a handful of accounts of campus life told by OSU alumni. The footage is a slice of the university’s Sesquicentennial Oral History Project, which compiles nearly 250 accounts by alumni dating back to the class of 1938 and is available online.

In a way, OPB owes its existence to OSU’s student radio station, which was spearheaded by a professor who wanted to tinker with nascent radio technology. Assuming the call sign KOAC, the student radio station provided campus listeners with crop reports and school band performances. In the 1950s, KOAC created a television station, which eventually opened stations in five cities, according to the documentary. Oregon Educational and Public Broadcasting Service, which formed in the 1970s and eventually became OPB, broadcast from OSU campus until 2009.

Throughout its 150 years, OSU has served as a microcosm for the rest of the country’s trials and tribulations, Horton said.

“As you go throughout the years, you see what’s going on politically or socially (on a national level) is also being mirrored in what’s going on at OSU as well,” Horton said. “It was interesting to see (OSU’s) really complex history and how it continues to have a much wider impact.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, pmadsen@bendbulletin.com