The Invention of Arbor Day

When Julius Sterling Morton arrived in Nebraska Territory in eighteen fifty-four, he found a place that the federal government's own surveyors had labeled the Great American Desert: flat, largely treeless, subject to prairie winds that could strip a field bare in a single afternoon. Morton was a journalist and later the editor of the Nebraska City News, and he understood that the land needed something.

Morton began planting trees on his farm outside Nebraska City. He advocated for tree planting in print, in speeches, and eventually from his seat on the State Board of Agriculture. In January of eighteen seventy-two, he introduced a resolution calling for a statewide tree-planting holiday. The board approved it. The first Arbor Day was observed on April tenth, eighteen seventy-two.

The results were, by any standard, extraordinary. Estimates from the period suggest that on that single day, Nebraska residents planted more than one million trees. The number is cited so often that it has the feel of legend, but the State Board of Agriculture reported it officially. Whether the precise count is exact or rounded, the point is clear: the response was immediate and enormous.

Nebraska formalized Arbor Day as a legal state holiday in eighteen eighty-five and set the date as April twenty-second, Morton's birthday. By that time the holiday had already spread to other states. Today it is observed in all fifty states and in numerous countries around the world.

Morton went on to serve as Secretary of Agriculture under President Grover Cleveland from eighteen ninety-three through eighteen ninety-seven. His estate outside Nebraska City, Arbor Lodge, is now a state park. The cottonwoods and cedars on the property are old enough to have been planted by Morton's own hand.