On April 15, 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt, issued an “Arbor Day Proclamation to the School Children of the United States,” telling them:

It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetimes 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.