Arbor Day was founded in 1872 by J Sterling Morton in Nebraska City, Nebraska. By the 1920s, each state in the U.S. had passed public laws that stipulated a certain day for Arbor Day observance. The national holiday is celebrated every year on the last Friday in April; in Nebraska, it is a civic holiday.The customary observance is to plant a tree. On the first Arbor Day, April 10, 1872, an estimated one million trees were planted.

A celebration of the OSU Tree Campus Wooster designation is planned for the April 20 Wooster Arbor Day celebration. In true Tree Campus USA fashion, the event will connect our OSU Wooster campuses, OARDC, ATI, and Ohio State Extension, the local community of the City of Wooster, our partner institution the College of Wooster, and involve students, staff and faculty from OARDC, ATI, and OSU Extension. It will be a celebration on many levels, including the fact that Ohio State University will become one of only six universities to have two Tree Campus USA campuses.

The following agenda is planned:

Don't miss the world premiere of 'The Tale of Five Oaks' poem to the OSU Wooster Campus and comments from OSU/OARDC Secrest Arboretum Director Ken Cochran, OSU Chadwick Arboretum Director Mary Maloney, the City of Wooster, the College of Wooster, ATI students and OARDC PhD candidate Alejandro Chiriboga, regarding his inventory and ecological audit of the community forest of the City of Wooster. This is a wonderful convocation of the community spirit of why trees matter…and a great companion to the Arbor Day Celebration on the OSU Main Campus the following Friday, April 26.

"It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation's need of trees will become serious. We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted." - Theodore Roosevelt, 1907