Arbor Day - April 25th
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008Arbor Day was established by J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska City, Nebraska in 1872. He and his wife moved from Detroit, Michigan to the Nebraska Territory in 1854, where he was the editor of Nebraska’s first newspaper. His influence as a journalist led to his involvement in politics, and he became a promoter of the settlement of Nebraska. The lack of trees, however, was an obstacle.
The Great Plains had been described as the “Great American Desert.” The tallgrass prairie that covered much of Nebraska at that time could provide rich farmland, but without wood for building houses or for fuel to heat homes, few found it convenient to settle there. Even the allotment of free land by the Homestead Act failed to entice sufficient numbers of families to relocate to Nebraska.
Morton first proposed Arbor Day as a tree-planting holiday in 1872 at a meeting of the Nebraska State Board of Agriculture. On the first Arbor Day, April 10, 1874, prizes were offered to counties and to individuals for properly planting the largest number of trees. It was claimed that more than 1 million trees were planted in Nebraska on that day.

