Arbor Day with Theodore Roosevelt

A Holiday Born on the Plains

Arbor Day started in Nebraska. J. Sterling Morton proposed it, and the state first observed it on April 10, 1872. Nebraskans planted an estimated one million trees or more that day.

The idea spread state by state, and each state picked its own day. Some held it in winter, some in spring, and some later in the year, though, as T.R. wrote in 1907, it came "chiefly in this month of April." New York's 1888 law set Arbor Day on the Friday after the first of May. In T.R.'s lifetime there was never one national date, so his Arbor Day story is a set of moments, not one yearly ritual.

Governor Roosevelt's Proclamation

On April 12, 1900, Governor Roosevelt signed a "Proclamation as to Arbor Day" in Albany. "The fourth of May next will be Arbor Day, established by statute," it begins. "The school children of this State have planted more than two hundred thousand trees within the ten years in which Arbor Day has been recognized."

He made the case for the country in an age of cities: "The steady tendency towards the disproportionate growth of cities renders it all the more necessary to foster the things of the country." Then he set a rule worth remembering. In most of New York, he wrote, "no tree ought ever to be cut down unless two are planted in its place. The custom of tree planting should be favored in every way."

Planting a Forest on the Prairie

Two years later, as President, T.R. backed an experiment in Morton's home state. On April 16, 1902, he signed proclamations creating the Niobrara and Dismal River Forest Reserves in the Nebraska Sandhills. Botanist Charles Bessey had proposed planting a forest there, and more than 200,000 treeless acres were set aside for it.

That August, an executive order reserved more Nebraska public land "for the use of the Department of Agriculture for purposes in connection with experimental tree planting." In 1908 the reserves were combined, with the 1906 North Platte Reserve, into the Nebraska National Forest, a forest planted by people.

J. Sterling Morton died on April 27, 1902, at Lake Forest, Illinois, eleven days after T.R. signed the Sandhills proclamations.

"The Founder of Arbor Day"

On April 27, 1903, T.R.'s western tour reached Grand Island, Nebraska. He turned the sod for a new library there, and he spoke about trees. "Nebraska was originally a well-nigh treeless state," he told the crowd. "The great bulk of the trees here have been planted by its own people."

Then he gave the credit where it belonged: "The founder of Arbor Day was that upright and able public servant, the late ex-Secretary Sterling Morton. Arbor Day has extended far beyond the limits of the state and all over the Union. Now millions of children as well as millions of grown people learn practically on Arbor Day the wisdom of trying to plant trees where they do not exist, and trying to preserve them for the public use where they do exist."

Later that day in Hastings, he said he had spoken that morning about "the remarkable work done by Nebraska in tree-planting," and paid tribute "to the memory of the late Sterling Morton, whose interest in tree culture was so great."

Greetings for San Diego's Children

On March 17, 1904, San Diego held an Arbor Day in City Park, the land that is now Balboa Park. Kate Sessions helped organize the planting, and thousands of schoolchildren came. Representatives of their classes and schools planted pines and cypresses at two spots called Pine Point and Cypress Point.

The President was there in words. T.R. had written to the schoolchildren of San Diego the day before, congratulating them on establishing Arbor Day, and his greetings were read to the children at the park, as the San Diego Union reported.

How the Country Heard It

Newspapers across the country reprinted the letter. A South Carolina paper ran it on its front page on April 17 under the headline "What Arbor Day Means to the School Children."

One reader had a family stake in it. Paul Morton, J. Sterling Morton's son and T.R.'s former Secretary of the Navy, wrote on April 15 to praise the message and call it an excellent precedent. T.R. wrote back the next day to thank him for his letter. Cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman's "The President's Arbor Day Advice," reprinted in weekly papers that month, showed T.R. leaning on his big stick while a bear and a group of children plant trees, with the line "Some day we will have another crop of big sticks."

Did He Really…?

Start Arbor Day? No. Morton did, in Nebraska in 1872, and T.R. said so himself at Grand Island in 1903.

Issue the first presidential Arbor Day proclamation? No. The 1907 document is a letter, signed and dated at the White House, even though it is often called a proclamation. The earliest presidential Arbor Day proclamation in the American Presidency Project's archive is Warren G. Harding's of March 31, 1922, for the holiday's 50th anniversary. Richard Nixon proclaimed a National Arbor Day in 1972. T.R.'s formal Arbor Day proclamation came in 1900, as Governor of New York.

Say "The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself"? No. That line is Franklin D. Roosevelt's, from a February 26, 1937 letter to the nation's governors.

Say "a nation without trees" is hopeless? Not in those words. His actual 1907 line is: "A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as hopeless; forests which are so used that they cannot renew themselves will soon vanish, and with them all their benefits." Quote images online often trim or reword it.

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