Arbor Day comes around every year, and most people let it pass without a second thought. No day off, no party, no card aisle at the Dollar Store. It slides by somewhere in late April, quiet as a Tuesday. The origin story deserves better than that.
A Newspaper Editor in a State With Almost No Trees
J. Sterling Morton grew up in Michigan, married his college sweetheart in 1854, and on the day of their wedding, they headed straight to the Nebraska Territory. Morton had journalism in his blood and quickly landed a job editing the Nebraska News.
Nebraska in the 1850s was almost completely treeless. Open, windswept prairie in every direction. Morton, who had grown up surrounded by eastern woodlands, found that alarming in a practical sense. Trees meant fuel, lumber, windbreaks that kept crops alive and topsoil in place. Without them, farming the plains was brutal work with almost nothing to fall back on.
So he started writing about it. He used his newspaper to push Nebraskans to plant trees, delivered speeches, and eventually worked his way onto the Nebraska State Board of Agriculture, where he could actually do something.
On January 4, 1872, he stood up at a board meeting in Lincoln and proposed something simple. Set aside one day, statewide, for tree planting. Offer prizes to whoever planted the most. Call it Arbor Day, from the Latin word for tree.
The board approved it unanimously.
One Million Trees in a Single Day
The first Arbor Day was April 10, 1872. By the end of it, Nebraskans had planted an estimated one million trees.
One million. In a day.
Rob Henry, Homeslice Media’s chief brand officer, wandered into the office while this article was being put together and mentioned, unprompted, that he won a $25 scholarship in fourth grade for a story he wrote about Arbor Day. He seemed pretty proud of it.
By 1882, Arbor Day had spread to schools across the country. By 1885, Nebraska made it a legal holiday, setting the date as April 22, Morton’s birthday. By the 1920s, every state had recognized it, and countries from Australia to Japan had established their own versions.
Morton became U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under President Grover Cleveland. His family home in Nebraska City, Arbor Lodge, grew from a four-room cabin into a 52-room mansion surrounded by trees he planted himself. It’s a state park now.
Out Here, Trees Were Never Decoration
On the northern plains, the idea of planting trees was never a casual one. Homesteaders in Dakota Territory put cottonwoods and cedars along their property lines because the wind came without warning and took everything with it. Topsoil, crops, sometimes the season itself. A shelterbelt meant a farm had a fighting chance at getting through winter, and everyone who worked that land knew it.
South Dakota adopted Arbor Day early. The holiday was first observed in Dakota Territory in 1884, barely a decade after Morton had the idea in Nebraska. Tree-planting programs ran for generations after that, including the shelterbelt project of the 1930s, when FDR’s administration put 18,000 miles of windbreaks across six Great Plains states to hold soil together after the Dust Bowl.
Those rows are still standing. Drive east of the Missouri on any rural highway and you’ll see them, straight lines of trees marking old property boundaries, still blocking the same wind.
Earth Day Ate Its Lunch
Earth Day arrived in 1970 and gradually absorbed the cultural attention Arbor Day used to hold. Both holidays share the same general instinct, and once Earth Day had the broader message and political energy behind it, Arbor Day got smaller in the public imagination. School ceremonies that had centered on planting in late April shifted earlier in the month.
Morton would have found that ironic. His whole argument for Arbor Day was that it looked forward. He said it himself: “Other holidays repose upon the past; Arbor Day proposes for the future.” Not a bad line for a man born in 1832.
The holiday still exists. The Arbor Day Foundation is active, offers free trees to new members, and the last Friday in April still carries the designation.
For a region that spent generations planting trees in ground that didn’t want them, that’s worth at least a passing thought.
Sources
History Nebraska, “J. Sterling Morton Creates Arbor Day,” history.nebraska.gov
Arbor Day Foundation, “History of Arbor Day,” arborday.org
South Dakota State University, “Trees of South Dakota,” sdstate.edu, April 26, 2023
Britannica, “Arbor Day,” britannica.com
Farm Progress, “Remembering and Rebuilding First Shelterbelts,” farmprogress.com, April 23, 2024
TIME, “Arbor Day 2017: How the Holiday Began in Nebraska 145 Years Ago,” time.com
Nebraska Studies, “J. Sterling Morton: Founder of Arbor Day,” nebraskastudies.org
