by Eric Rutkow
In late January 1898, twenty mills from across the Northeast merged together to form the International Paper Company. The initial capitalization totaled $45 million, and the company’s assets reportedly included 1 million acres of American timberland and 1.6 million acres in Canada. The company’s president declared in his first annual report that International Paper controlled 90 percent of eastern newsprint production. However, other great combinations, like the Great Northern Paper Company, followed on its heels.
By 1906, the papermaking and allied printing trade ranked sixth in national importance, but this number failed to capture how important the new industry was becoming to American society. Newspapers and books offered the primary form of information exchange in the years before radio and television. Cheap paper facilitated record keeping and permitted the growth of businesses and government. The introduction of such products as paper towels, sanitary napkins, tissue paper, and toilet paper transformed domestic life. Later, new papermaking techniques produced stronger, cheaper materials that revolutionized the shipping and container industries, everything from cardboard boxes to milk cartons. Americans began living in a brave new world of paper thanks to trees.
The growth of the paper industry, however, placed further stress on America’s forest resources, already straining under the weight of commercial logging, rampant forest fires, and agricultural clearing. Paper companies were cutting down 625 square miles of spruce land annually. A government official noted in 1898: “[T]he original forests cannot long suffice to supply the increasing demands for spruce which are made upon them. . . . Cutting for pulp does far more harm than cutting for lumber, because it takes a vastly greater number of trees.”
WOOD-PULP MANUFACTURING was not the only sector exploiting the nation’s forests for nontimber resources during the last half of the nineteenth century. Many essential American industries depended on such forest products, though the finished goods often bore no signs of their dependence on trees.
One of the largest consumers of forest resources was the leather industry. Though this material had long been integral to American life, it gained new importance in the late nineteenth century. Factories relied on leather belts to turn their equipment; farmers and ranchers depended on leather harnesses and saddles; furniture featured leather as upscale upholstery; it was the main material of countless fashion articles. By 1910, the Central Leather Company was one of the ten largest businesses in the nation.
The key to making leather was a compound known as tannin (hence the term “leather tanner”). Heavy hides were soaked in tannin for twelve to fifteen months, yielding a finished product that was tough, flexible, and decay resistant. In the nineteenth century, the best source of tannin was tree bark, especially from black oaks and hemlocks, which grew abundantly in New York and Pennsylvania. The lumber industry had already opened up these forests to commerce by the 1840s but they had taken only the white pines. Leather producers, who required two and a half cords of bark to produce sufficient tannin for one hundred hides, soon began to strip these forests of the hemlocks that remained. At the industry’s peak around the turn of the century, hemlock was being cut on over a million acres annually.
The iron industry also owed a debt to the nation’s forests. While the majority of the metal came from coal-powered forges, a significant percentage depended on charcoal, a type of fuel formed by burning trees in an oxygen-deprived environment. Charcoal-forged iron, though not the most popular, had unique physical attributes that made it particularly well-suited for several industrial uses, most notably railroad wheels. Thus, the countless millions of wooden railroad cars produced in the nineteenth century were sitting above countless millions of wheels equally dependent on American trees.
The process of manufacturing charcoal also generated volatile chemicals. Initially, these were considered worthless, but they gained value as the nineteenth century progressed and scientists made advances in industrial chemistry. Most large charcoal furnaces started to include retort facilities that separated the chemicals into useful by-products including tar, methanol, acetone, and acetate of lime. For a number of years trees were producing more industrial chemicals than any other source.
Perhaps the most valuable tree-derived compound was the solvent turpentine. Its uses in the nineteenth century were countless: varnish; cleaning materials; naval stores; a thinner for oil-based paints; a cheap alternative to whale oil, the most popular source of lamp fuel. The turpentine industry flourished in the long-leaf pine forests that ranged across the South and had been providing the nation with naval stores since colonial times. Scraping trees for turpentine was dangerous work—the vapors harmed many major systems in the body, including the central nervous system; they were also flammable. Few free laborers wanted to risk the work, and in the years after the Civil War, the industry gained a reputation for using convict labor, a practice permitted in every southern state after 1876.
It seemed as though hardly any industry in the nation did not rely on trees during the late nineteenth century. Forests were no longer regions to be cleared for settlement but regions to be cleared for commerce. As the U.S. Commissioner of Agriculture’s Report of 1883 noted:
There is scarcely a comfort or convenience of life with which the forests are not intimately connected. We depend upon them, to an important extent, for food, shelter, and clothing, the prime necessities of life. . . . The[re] would not be either precious or useful metals, if we had not the forests with which to make them such. Our [rail] cars and ships are the products of the forests. The thousand tools of our various handicrafts, the machineries of our factories, the conveniences of our warehouse, and the comfort and adornments of our dwellings are the product largely of the forests. Behind all the varied industries and conveniences of life stand the forests as their chief source and support.
Of course, this prolonged period of industrial exploitation was leaving the forests more vulnerable than ever. Lumbermen were cutting out the white pines at breakneck speeds, while other industries followed to exploit the manifold tree species that remained. The forests that had once seemed endless began to reveal their limitations, and attitudes toward the nation’s trees started to shift. Some people advocated better treatment of the forests on moral grounds. Others warned that the day of reckoning was coming and that soon the nation would run out of timber. Out of these concerns emerged new structures and institutions that would forever change the nation, and forever alter the relationship that Americans had with their trees.
5
A Changing Consciousness
Shading the Prairie
FOR MOST OF THE NATION’S first century, the average American showed little interest in planting and cultivating trees. Men like George Washington were notable exceptions in a country populated by utilitarian-minded farmers and, increasingly, by wood-hungry industries. Tree planting required capital, labor, and several decades’ worth of patience, but the American style of productivity minimized these factors in favor of resource exploitation whenever possible. With forests abundant throughout the East, few outside the wealthiest classes, the cider orchardists, or the occasional town father, saw the merit in growing something that nature seemed to provide inexhaustibly.
Attitudes began to change noticeably during the mid-nineteenth century’s demographic shift toward the Midwest. While the enormous Lake States logging industry provided timber to the region, the operations of men like Weyerhaeuser, Ogden, and Stephenson could not entirely supplant the needs, both economic and cultural, of a people conditioned to life in the tree-rich eastern states. By the mid-1860s midwestern states started to implement small-scale legislation to encourage tree planting. An 1868 Kansas act offered a bounty of two dollars per acre to anyone successfully cultivating timber for three years. Similar-themed laws appeared over the next several years in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, and Nebraska. At the same time, midwestern railroads, desperate for cheap supplies of ties, began experimentally planting trees. The Kansas Pacific Rai
lroad created three tree stations in 1870, and the idea quickly spread to other train lines.
Almost all of these new laws and programs, however, were limited in scope, short-lived, and generally unsuccessful. Few individuals knew anything about the methods of propagating trees—the nascent study of tree care, known as arboriculture, had not yet reached America—and the local climate, more arid than back East and susceptible to severe winter frosts, inhibited growth. Farmers and railroads planted countless acres of trees only to watch them wither and die. The anticipated economic and cultural benefits failed to materialize.
While these early efforts were largely unremarkable, they foreshadowed a much wider embrace of tree planting. The idea that trees were not simply a natural resource to be exploited but also a civilizing agent to be stewarded was about to capture the collective imagination of the nation. This movement would involve millions of people and evolve over several decades, though it began, like so many things, with the vision of a single person.
J. Sterling Morton was born on April 22, 1832, in New York State. His family had deep roots in American soil, with some ancestors arriving on the ship that followed the Mayflower—one of his relatives was secretary of Plymouth Colony. When Morton was two years old, his parents moved to Michigan, and he spent most of his early years there, attending the state university at Ann Arbor and working briefly as a journalist for the Detroit Free Press and the Chicago Times.
After marrying in 1854, the ambitious Morton decided to seek out new opportunities farther west. The area that now comprises the state of Nebraska was just beginning to open: The Indian title to the Omaha and Otoe lands had been extinguished in the spring of 1854, and, shortly thereafter, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created the Kansas and Nebraska territories and also declared that settlers would have the right to determine if slavery would be permissible (known as “popular sovereignty,” this aspect of the act was a key catalyst in the formation of the Republican Party, which fervently opposed any expansion of slavery). In November 1854, Morton arrived at the eastern edge of the Nebraska territory with the very first wave of settlers, few of whom had a chance to plant crops. He explained, “I remember that we commenced the winter of 1854–5, a little colony of hopeful boarders, purchasing everything that we ate, and even feed for our horses and cattle.” The following year he and his wife settled in Nebraska City, a small community on the fertile western bank of the Missouri River.
Morton began working as editor of the local paper, the Nebraska City News, and used this platform to help establish his reputation. His biographer explained that over time people got to know him “as a vigorous and colorful writer, a forceful and entertaining speaker, [and] a Democrat who clung tenaciously to the traditions of the party.” His politics were notably conservative: He vehemently defended the expansion of slavery into Nebraska, and he described Indians as a race of people who “must die, and a few years hence only be known through their history as it was recorded by the Anglo-Saxon.” But these issues were not necessarily his paramount concerns. Rather, Morton primarily preached the virtues of an agriculture-based society and also spent much of his early career fulminating against the excesses of the “wildcat” banks that sprung up in his territory, encouraged speculation, and, in his words, “defrauded [Nebraskans] of some hundred thousands of dollars worth of capital and labor.”
Before long, influential Democrats recruited Morton into public service. President James Buchanan appointed him secretary of the Nebraska Territory in July 1858, and Morton held this position for three years—he spent six months of this time doing double duty as the acting governor. For the rest of his career he was a frequent Democratic candidate for a wide range of political offices, though he never served in an elected position (as Nebraska leaned Republican).
Outside of his life in newspapers and politics, Morton displayed a passion for horticulture, particularly as it related to trees. When he and his wife settled in Nebraska City, they had acquired a farm of 160 acres—this was the standard size for homesteader plots, which were known as quarter sections since they constituted one-fourth of a square mile. Much of this land he devoted to tree planting, constantly experimenting to see what varieties of forest and fruit trees might thrive on the plains. One of his contemporaries commented in 1871, “his farm . . . is one of the best improved places in Nebraska. He has an orchard of some two thousand fruit trees, with all the best varieties of apples, peaches, plum, &c., which are as prolific as in any state in the Union. In his horticultural capacity he has performed a commendable work in dispelling the old fallacy that ‘fruit will not grow in Nebraska.’”
Morton not only grew trees, but also encouraged tree planting in speeches and through his newspaper. Their propagation, he believed, was an essential component in civilizing the young state and in promoting it as a new destination for potential settlers, many of whom worried about restarting life in a treeless region, even if there was cheap land for the taking.
Morton’s passionate advocacy on this topic led to the State Horticultural Society asking him in 1871 “to prepare and publish an address to the people of the State setting forth all important facts relative to fruit growing in Nebraska.” Morton delivered this speech in early January 1872 at the society’s annual meeting. He argued, in one of his most eloquent appeals for tree planting:
There is comfort in a good orchard, in that it makes the new home more like the “old home in the East.” . . . Orchards are missionaries of culture and refinement. They make the people among whom they grow a better and more thoughtful people. If every farmer in Nebraska will plant out and cultivate an orchard and a flower garden, together with a few forest trees, this will become mentally and morally the best agricultural State, the grandest community of producers in the American Union. . . . If I had the power I would compel every man in the State who had a home of his own, to plant out and cultivate fruit trees.
On the day of this speech, however, Morton did more than just talk about the need to grow trees. Concurrently with the Horticultural Society gathering, the State Board of Agriculture was holding its annual meeting, and Morton attended both events. During the board’s discussions, he presented the following fateful resolution: “Resolved, That, Wednesday the 10th day of April, 1872, be and the same is hereby especially set apart and consecrated for tree planting in the State of Nebraska, and the State Board of Agriculture, hereby name it ‘Arbor Day.’”
Members of the board reacted warmly to Morton’s novel suggestion for raising awareness about tree planting. They had already tried offering small cash prizes for tree planting, and Arbor Day seemed like a creative way to get more Nebraskans involved in an activity that they all agreed was vital to the state’s future. The only concern that some raised dealt with the proposal’s name. Several members preferred “Sylvan Day.” Morton countered that this would wrongly imply an emphasis on forest trees (“sylva” typically connoted woodlands, as in the word “Pennsylvania,” which literally meant “Penn’s Woods”). Morton’s vision included both forest and fruit trees, and he ultimately used his prestige and authority to coerce the board into accepting the name “Arbor Day.” Little did any of them appreciate how famous this term would become.
The original resolution passed unanimously. One of its strongest backers on the board was its president, Robert Furnas, a staunch Republican and Morton’s bitter political rival. The two men stood on opposite sides of the slavery question and nearly everything else, but tree planting was an issue where they found common ground. They put their differences aside to promote the proposed holiday and petitioned media outlets throughout the state to rally behind the event in order to drum up interest. Furnas later explained, “The newspapers of the State were generous, and kept Arbor Day well before the people.”
By the time April 10 finally arrived the entire state was abuzz with talk of trees. According to Furnas, more than one million trees were planted during that inaugural celebration. Morton was unable to participate be
cause the eight hundred trees that he ordered failed to arrive. He did, however, submit an article to the Omaha Daily Herald to commemorate the occasion and, once again, argue for the importance of tree planting in producing a strong society: “There is a true triumph in the unswerving integrity and genuine democracy of trees, for they refuse to be influenced by money or social position and thus tower morally, as well as physically, high above Congressmen and many other patriots of this dollaring age.”
With each passing year, the status of Arbor Day in Nebraska grew. In 1874 Furnas, now governor, issued an executive proclamation urging “the whole people of the state to observe it, by planting forest, fruit, or ornamental trees.” The legislature formally designated it a legal holiday in 1885, selecting as the official date April 22, Morton’s birthday. Ten years later it resolved that the state “shall hereafter, in a popular sense, be known and referred to as the ‘Tree Planter’s State’”—this moniker lasted until 1945, when it was changed to the “Cornhusker State,” reflecting the state’s shift in priorities.
As word of Arbor Day spread beyond Nebraska, others rushed to emulate the holiday. The earliest adopters were similarly situated states that wanted to promote tree culture to encourage agriculture and settlement. Iowa’s horticultural society instituted an Arbor Day later in 1872, and other states across the interior followed soon thereafter. By the mid-1880s, however, some form of Arbor Day had spread to nearly every state in the nation. The holiday became especially popular in public schools throughout the country, the result of a campaign that several advocacy groups began in 1882 to help raise awareness of the importance of trees to the nation. Arbor Day even proved to have resonance beyond America’s borders, with countless nations rushing to adopt the practice. Furnas commented in the 1890s, “No observance ever sprang into existence so rapidly, favorably, permanently, and now so near universally throughout the whole civilized world as that of ‘Arbor Day.’”