46 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1900. 



we must protect the forests that the fields may not cease to 

 bloom. 



J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska, Secretary of Agriculture, 

 who, for eighteen years, had planted trees about his home, Arbor 

 Lodge, making it a cool, green, sheltered spot on a burning, 

 wind-swept plain, in 1872 conceived the idea of setting apart 

 a day for tree planting. Before that time, rows of trees as 

 wind-breaks about the ranch buildings, with here and there a 

 little foliage along the river banks, was all that gave variety 

 to that great rolling prairie. 



Mr. Morton on January 4th, 1872, in the city of Lincoln, 

 Neb., at the State Board of Agriculture, introduced a resolution 

 declaring that a day in April be set apart for tree planting, to 

 be named Arbor Day, its object to avert treelessness, to improve 

 the climatic conditions — for the sanitation and embellishment of 

 home environments — for the love of the beautiful and useful, 

 combined in the music and majesty of a tree, as fancy and truth 

 unite in an epic poem. 



One hundred dollars was offered to any Nebraska county 

 planting the greatest number of trees, and a farm library, cost- 

 ing twenty-five dollars, to any person properly planting the 

 greatest number of trees. Thus Arbor Day originated, and the 

 cry of " plant trees" resounded throughout the State. 



On March 31st, 1874, Gov. Robert W. Furnas issued the first 

 proclamation for the observation of the new holiday. Some 

 years later the legislature made the 22nd of April, Sec. Mor- 

 ton's birthday, a legal holiday, and christened it Arbor Day. 

 So quickly did it appeal to the intelligent, beauty-loving people 

 of the State, that upon its first anniversary, one million trees 

 were planted, and within sixteen years, three hundred and 

 fifty-five million forest, fruit and shade trees, one firm alone 

 having a contract for planting three :md a half million forest 

 trees. 



Nebraska is known as the tree planting State. So readily do 

 trees grow in its fertile soil that thousands are pulled up by the 

 roots from the banks of the Missouri, set in rows in ploughed 

 furrows, the earth turned back upon their roots, trodden down 



