Guayule Lath House (site)

 lab, agriculture

The "guayule nursery experiment" began at Manzanar in the spring of 1942 under the direction of Dr. Robert Emerson, of the California Institute of Technology. The project, which was taken over by the U.S. Forest Service on June 1, was designed to "find a suitable method to produce rubber in the shortest possible period." The work was carried out in the guayule lath house constructed south of Block 6 during July 1942. As the project progressed, the building was expanded to twice its size later that month, finally measuring 104 feet x 136 feet.

Photo by Dorothea Lange shows hybrider George J. Yokomizo at work in the newly fabricated lath house, July 1942.

From the Manzanar Free Press of 20 March 1943:
"Guayule project has come a long way since April, 1942, when the waste cuttings and seedling culls arrived from the Salinas nurseries. Since then, lath house and propagating beds have been built at the southwest corner of camp, chemical laboratory in Ironing Room 6, cytogenetics laboratory in the hospital, field plots located at various points in and around camp, and Ironing Room 35 is being converted into a breeding laboratory. Experiments are being made on the extraction of rubber from guayule cryptostegia, and other less promising rubber bearing plants by a new and rapid method developed here. Samples of these tested rubbers have been vulcanized in Los Angeles, and proved to be of good quality. Valuable results of more technical nature have also been obtained. Through experimentation it was found that Salinas strains of guayule are capable of surviving winter at Manzanar, but Texas strains proved to be hardier. Evidence up to the present time indicates that under climatic conditions at Manzanar, Texas strains are superior to Salinas strains in rubber formation. Scientists from Stanford University, University of California at Los Angeles, and Berkeley, and California Institute of Technology, have been visiting the guayule project in increasing numbers. Under the direction of Dr. Kenji Nozaki, the scientific work on guayule is being carried out along with the nursery propagation and field work supervised by Walter T. Watanabe, while breeding and flower biology is led by Masuo Kodani, experienced geneticist and cytologist."