Part IThe Story
Somewhere west of Chicago, on a hill above the east branch of the DuPage River, the grass was on fire, and two men who had driven out from the city for no better reason than the pleasure of driving stopped the car and got out to put it out. One of them was Joy Morton, a salt merchant in his early fifties, six feet two inches tall, raised on the Nebraska plains and comfortable in open country. The arboretum that now covers that hill tells the story with the polish of something repeated often. It does not name the friend, give the month, or say what the two men used against the flames. What it does record is that when the fire was out, Morton looked around at the groves of native oak on the crest and decided to stay.
He bought the hill in 1909. He named the place Thornhill, partly for its position and partly for the hawthorns that grew around it. Over the next decade he bought the land around it one parcel at a time: dozens of small farms, the woodlots farmers kept for fuel and fence posts, about a thousand acres in all at roughly $100 an acre. Then, on December 14, 1922, with his family and a group of Morton Salt Company executives watching, he signed a trust indenture that turned his country estate into what he called a "great outdoor museum" of trees.
The paradoxes are easy to state. The man who put out the fire had made his fortune in a substance that, in any real concentration, kills almost every land plant it reaches. His father had become famous by telling a treeless territory to plant trees, and the son paid for the largest of the family's plantings with money earned by keeping meat from rotting. The fire itself echoes an older one. Morton had arrived in Chicago nine years after the city burned in October 1871, when six hundred blocks of Michigan pine housing went up in a long, hot, dry autumn and the rebuilding created steady demand for everything, including salt.
There is also the matter of the land. A later curator, Rita Hassert of the arboretum's Sterling Morton Library, put it bluntly: "The landscape looks very raw. It was farm fields beforehand. It was not that he came to this horticultural paradise and put a fence up around it." Morton did not find a forest. He found a few oaks on a hilltop, surrounded by cow pasture, and he spent the last eleven years of his life trying to make the oaks the rule and the pasture the exception, hurrying as though he knew the schedule would be tight.
Everything else in this story moves outward from that hilltop and comes back to it. That includes the cylindrical blue box with a girl and an umbrella on it, a machine that printed telegrams that would one day sit next to minicomputers in university basements, and a set of railway terminals redrawn for a city plan. It includes a father who advised his eldest son to choose a wife the way a stockman chooses breeding animals, and a mother whose family name became the son's first name. And it includes four columns at the end of a hedged lane, which this piece will reach at the end.
By the Numbers
The Salt and the Trees
$10,000Joy Morton's 1880 stake in a Chicago salt distributor, backed by his father
$30MPrice AT&T paid in stock for Teletype Corporation in 1930, the company Morton financed from an attic lab
25 yearsMorton's service on the Chicago Plan Commission
~1,000,000Trees Nebraskans were estimated to have planted on the first Arbor Day, 1872
1,700 acresSize of the Morton Arboretum today, grown from a core of about 175
$3.2BPrice paid in 2021 for K+S's Americas salt business, including Morton Salt
4,100+Plant species in the arboretum's living collections
A Motto Is Not an Inheritance
The family motto was two words long, and it was an instruction: Plant Trees.
Julius Sterling Morton, who went by J. Sterling, came from a family of newspapermen. In 1834 his grandfather Abner Morton began editing the newly founded Monroe Journal in Monroe, Michigan, and Abner's sons bought and renamed papers so often that following their mastheads is a small research project of its own. J. Sterling's father, Julius Dewey Morton, was a Methodist leader and a pro-Union Republican. In 1846 he enrolled his fourteen-year-old son at the Wesleyan Seminary in Albion, Michigan, then a college-preparatory school. There the boy met Caroline Joy French, who arrived in 1847, and the two graduated from the preparatory course together in 1850. They married in Detroit on October 30, 1854, and moved almost immediately to the new Nebraska Territory, a place their friends and connections had recommended to an ambitious young Democrat as somewhere to make a career.
J. Sterling did make a career there, though never quite the one he wanted. He edited the Nebraska City News. He served as clerk of the territorial supreme court and as secretary of the territory, and briefly as its acting governor. He became a Bourbon Democrat of a fairly conservative kind, the type the Chicago Reader would later describe, with some affection, as a "brash, politically conservative editor and big-business publicist with a Johnny Appleseed complex." In 1872, while sitting on the Nebraska state board of agriculture, he proposed a day for planting trees and promoted it through his newspaper. By the newspaper accounts of the time, Nebraskans planted about a million trees on that first Arbor Day. "This is before social media to alert people," Hassert said a century and a half later, "and I find that number just astronomical."
The reason for the holiday was not mainly sentimental. Both Mortons had grown up in the wooded East, and the prairie unsettled them. "Trees represented a number of things to those early pioneers," Hassert explained. "It meant stability. It meant building material. It meant aesthetic beauty. It meant food for their table in some cases." J. Sterling wanted Nebraska to look more like Michigan, partly so that Easterners would find it habitable and settle there, and partly because a forested landscape looked to him like a civilized one. Arbor Day was an engineering project for the landscape, presented as a civic festival.
The man was demanding about more than the landscape. Ballowe's biography of Joy, which draws on fifty boxes of family letters, shows a father who expected his four sons to become rich and who treated their marriages as one more thing to plan. When Joy began looking for a wife, J. Sterling wrote to him:
— J. Sterling Morton, letter to his son Joy, as quoted by James BalloweSelect with a view to improving our race…. Use judgment, taste, common sense of a skilled breeder of domestic animals, who never selects from those afflicted with a diseased ancestry.
The language of the farm show ran through everything he said. Ancestry, stock, and selection were how he understood both trees and children.
Caroline is harder to see clearly. The sources call her an accomplished artist, a musician, and a gardener. During her husband's frequent absences on political and newspaper business she ran the farm that would later be called Arbor Lodge, and she ran it well. She also suffered from depression and loneliness and never adjusted to the isolation of the territory. When her first child was due she traveled back to Detroit to give birth, and Joy was born there on September 27, 1855, before she brought him back west. She gave him her own family name as his first name. Joy was not a whimsical choice by hopeful parents. It was a surname, his mother's line written into his name where everyone would see it, and he carried it through a life that had very little joy-sounding about it: a company, a trust, a commission, and a hilltop of oaks.
She died in 1881. By then her eldest son was twenty-five, newly married, and starting in the salt business in Chicago. The motto went with him. As a motto it described a duty, and it said nothing about how the duty should be paid for.
The Prolonged Apprenticeship
Ballowe titles the second chapter of his biography "A Prolonged Apprenticeship," which is a gentler phrase than the one the Chicago Reader used. The Reader called young Joy "a bit of a laggard at first," and on the evidence it is hard to argue.
The early record is a long list of jobs. Before he was fifteen Joy had farmed, worked on a railroad survey crew, hauled freight by wagon, and clerked in a bank. At fifteen he left school for good, though one account also mentions a brief, unsuccessful stay at the University of Michigan. In early 1871, a little before his sixteenth birthday, he enrolled in Mayhew's Business College in Detroit, which was run by Ira Mayhew, his great-uncle by marriage and a former principal of the Albion seminary where Joy's parents had met. The course took three months. Ballowe quotes the result: it gave Joy "an idea of business methods and of the value of system in recording business transactions."
That phrase about the value of system recurs throughout what followed. A boy who had grown up on a frontier farm, where nothing reliable came without effort, learned in a Detroit classroom that a ledger could function as an instrument, a way to see the business, and the habit lasted.
Then he became ill. In his late teens (the sources disagree on whether he was seventeen or eighteen) he contracted spinal meningitis, which was often fatal then and often disabling for those who survived. He recovered. His doctors' prescription was physical work and open air, so he spent two years farming his own land. The young man who left Nebraska City in his early twenties was the robust six-foot-two outdoorsman of later descriptions, though the strength had been rebuilt rather than inherited.
He was also, by then, behind his brothers, which in a family run like the Mortons' was a significant fact. Paul, born in 1857, and Mark, born in 1858, had taken management positions on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad and were advancing quickly. Paul in particular was a natural climber. He started as a railroad clerk and eventually became president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. In 1878 Paul found Joy an office job on the Burlington at Aurora, Illinois. The eldest son owed his first real position to the second son. Joy also worked for railroads in Omaha, and that same year he became engaged to Carrie Lake, daughter of George Lake, a judge on the Nebraska Supreme Court.
The Reader's summary is a little dismissive but accurate: Joy "knocked about in banking, railroad, and farming jobs, mostly set up by his father." One could tell this period as a story of drift. It is more useful to see it as accumulation. By twenty-five, Joy Morton had seen how goods moved across the prairie by wagon and by rail, how a bank extended credit and recovered it, how a farm made or lost money in a dry year, and how a railroad office allocated freight. He had seen almost every part of the Midwestern commodity economy except the one he would eventually control.
Ten Thousand Dollars of Another Man's Salt
Salt had arrived in Chicago before the Mortons did. In 1848, while the city was still small, Alonzo Richmond opened Richmond & Company as a sales agency for the Onondaga salt producers of upstate New York, shipping their salt west to the Midwestern trade. The California gold discovery that year produced an enormous demand among the miners, and salt has been called "white gold" for long enough that the company's own heritage page uses the phrase without irony. By the time Joy Morton was ready to invest, the business was the Chicago distribution house of Ezra Wheeler, E. I. Wheeler & Co., the established agent for the Michigan Salt Association, which was the dominant distributor in the Midwest.
Paul made the introduction. He recommended his older brother for a position, and in 1880 Wheeler offered a partnership. Joy accepted only after examining Wheeler's books, and the decision followed from what they showed. The nation's population was growing, the Chicago meatpacking industry needed salt in enormous quantities, and the city was rebuilding itself on the fastest scale anywhere in the country. With his father's backing Joy invested $10,000 and became a junior partner, and the money went into lake boats to move salt west.
There is an obvious point here that is easy to miss. Joy Morton did not start a salt company. He bought into a distributor. The asset was a position between the mines and brine wells of Michigan and New York and the packinghouses and kitchens of the West, together with the boats that connected them. Throughout his career he was fascinated by the routes goods traveled, and that fascination began in this first deal, which was really a purchase of a share in a shipping route.
The year 1880 also brought his marriage. He and Carrie moved to Chicago and took a house next door to Paul and Paul's new wife. For several years Joy divided his time between Chicago and Nebraska City, looking after the family farm, his father's interests, and his own. After his mother died in 1881 he also took on the work of keeping the family together. Wheeler traveled often, which left the junior partner running the business day to day, and he learned it the way he had learned everything else, by being the one who was present.
In 1885 Ezra Wheeler died. For about a year Joy was in partnership with Wheeler's widow. Then he bought her out, took majority ownership, and renamed the firm Joy Morton & Co., spreading smaller ownership shares among associates. The date of the takeover is inconsistent across the sources. Wikipedia gives 1886, the arboretum says 1887, and Morton Salt's official timeline says 1889. The disagreement fits a man who valued "system in recording business transactions" and who later built an empire whose history its own record-keepers cannot quite pin down.
He was thirty, perhaps thirty-one. Five years after arriving in Chicago with $10,000 of his father's backing, he owned the business.
Wasteful Competition
The arboretum's own history understandably plays down the next part of the story. The Chicago Reader does not.
"Ruthless as any of the entrepreneurial barons of the time," the Reader wrote, Joy Morton "undercut competitors to get established, then campaigned to eliminate 'wasteful competition.'" He speculated in grain, land, and cattle. He was a central figure in organizing trusts meant to control the prices of commodities including salt, starch, and lumber. Lumber is a bitter item on that list given the family motto, and so is starch. He developed Argo cornstarch, built the stockyards in Nebraska City, held interests in several banks, and paid $2,500 for a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade. The Illinois Times, reviewing Ballowe's book, summed up his politics: he "favored little government control and freedom for big business above all."
What makes him more interesting than a standard baron is that he understood how the trusts would fail. He recognized that price gouging would destroy them, and he warned his fellow members against it. He was a cartelist who wanted the cartel to be stable more than he wanted it to be greedy, someone who saw that a combination run too hard would invite the political reaction that would break it. That is cold reasoning, but it looks further ahead than most of his peers managed.
Then there is his father. From 1893 to 1897, J. Sterling Morton served as Grover Cleveland's Secretary of Agriculture, which made him the cabinet officer responsible for inspecting the food Americans ate. According to the Reader, the son "wasn't above using his father's position in Cleveland's cabinet to sic government inspectors on competitors or stop them from looking into his own operations." No euphemism improves that sentence. The founder of Arbor Day, the man who taught Nebraska to plant shade, was in the same years the government official whose inspectors his son could direct at rivals or away from himself.
The Mortons were not hypocrites in any simple sense. They held their views sincerely. J. Sterling believed in big business as firmly as he believed in trees, and he saw no conflict between the two, because both were forms of improvement and order brought to raw land. But the episode shows something about the family that recurs in the story. Their influence was always moving between the private and the public, and they were not especially troubled about which side of the line it ended up on.
Politics shaped how Joy felt about his home state as well. Ballowe records his disappointment in Nebraska's electoral support, or lack of it, for William McKinley. His sense of obligation to Nebraska City, where he would fund the Morton Library and the Overland Opera House, was "tempered," in Ballowe's word, by that disappointment. Chicago had the money, the connections, and the political sophistication. Nebraska had his childhood and his father's grave.
When It Rains
Salt has a branding problem: one grain of sodium chloride is chemically identical to another. In 523 A.D. the Roman statesman Cassiodorus wrote that "there never yet lived the man who does not desire salt, which makes every food more savory." But needing salt does not mean wanting a particular company's salt. Selling a commodity people cannot tell apart requires making them believe they can.
Morton's approach had two parts. The first was to make his salt uniform. By the time he incorporated the Morton Salt Company in 1910, the company was regarded as the largest salt supplier in North America and had become both a manufacturer and a merchant. It drew salt from mines in Michigan, brine wells in Louisiana and New York, and eventually sources around the world. A national supply drawn from so many places invites variation, and Morton set out to remove it. A quotation attributed to him is the most revealing thing he said about the business:
— Joy MortonThe final product is of such uniform high quality and grain that inspections under a microscope cannot reveal a difference between Morton salt made in New York and Morton salt made in California.
The boast is that the brand is not tied to any place. Salt from New York or California, from a mine or a brine well, would be the same product under magnification. Uniformity of that kind is what turns a commodity into something people buy by name.
The second part was to give the salt a feature other salt lacked. Any salt clumps in humid weather. In 1911 the company began adding magnesium carbonate as an anticaking agent, so that Morton's table salt poured even in damp air. It was sold in a round blue package with a patented metal pouring spout. The product was ready, and the remaining question was how to explain it to a public that did not know it had a problem.
Shortly after incorporation the company commissioned its first national consumer campaign. N. W. Ayer & Company, the Philadelphia advertising agency, was asked for twelve advertisements to run in consecutive issues of Good Housekeeping. The account executive brought twelve proposals and three alternates to the Morton offices. Sterling Morton, Joy's son, then in his mid-twenties and secretary of the new company, was drawn to one of the alternates. It showed a little girl walking in the rain with an umbrella in one hand and a package of salt tilted under her other arm, its spout open and salt streaming out behind her.
— Sterling Morton, recalling the 1911 Ayer presentationHere was the whole story in a picture — the message that the salt would run in damp weather was made beautifully evident.
The draft caption, "Even in rainy weather, it flows freely," was accurate but, in Sterling's words, too long: "We needed something short and snappy." The candidates got shorter: "Flows Freely." "Runs Freely." "Pours." Then someone suggested the old proverb It never rains but it pours, which had the right rhythm but was a complaint, the kind of thing people say when misfortunes pile up. They reversed its meaning and kept its shape: When It Rains It Pours. The girl and the slogan first appeared on the blue package in 1914.
A brand built on reassurance thus began by turning a proverb about trouble into a promise of convenience. The girl has had her clothes and hair updated in 1921, 1933, 1941, 1956, 1968, and again for her centennial in 2014. The Depression-era version had curls that suggested Shirley Temple. By the 1930s, as the Made-in-Chicago Museum puts it, Morton "could have re-cast the wee lass as an orangutan and it wouldn't have dented their reputation." She is regularly ranked among the ten best-known advertising symbols in the United States. In 2014 she became the first female icon voted into the Advertising Week Walk of Fame on Madison Avenue.
What the girl concealed was how small her part of the business was. A 1945 Morton advertisement admitted it with obvious satisfaction: "Out of every 10 pounds of salt produced in this country, 9 you never see!" Table salt was the visible part. The bulk of the business went to meatpacking, industry, agriculture, and later to icy roads. The brand gave a heavy industry a likable face.
It also gave the company a way to do public good on a national scale. In 1924, while Joy was still president, Morton Salt introduced iodized salt and distributed it nationally. Across the Great Lakes, Appalachia, and the Pacific Northwest, the region doctors called the "goiter belt," iodine-poor soil had left as many as 70 percent of children in some areas with goiter or related disorders. A uniform salt in a familiar package, sold in every grocery, turned out to be an effective way to deliver iodine. Joy Morton's reputation for ruthlessness and his company's contribution to public health come from the same capability: control over a necessity that everyone buys.
The Attic Above the Cold Storage
In 1902, the year J. Sterling Morton died, an electrical engineer named Frank Pearne approached Joy Morton looking for a backer.
Pearne wanted to build a printing telegraph, a machine that would type out a message at the receiving end so that no operator had to translate Morse code by ear. Morton could judge a salt contract quickly but had no basis for judging an electrical device, so he consulted someone who did. Charles Krum was a mechanical engineer and vice president of the Western Cold Storage Company, which was run by Joy's brother Mark. Krum liked the idea. They set up a laboratory in the attic of the Western Cold Storage building, so that a telegraph machine was being developed above a warehouse of refrigerated goods owned by a family whose fortune came from preservation.
Pearne left after about a year to teach at the Armour Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology. The standard account says he lost interest. His descendants say Morton did not pay him enough to support his family. Both explanations may be partly true, and the second one fits the image of a man who had campaigned against "wasteful competition." Krum continued the work. In August 1903 he filed a patent for a "typebar page printer," and in 1904 another for a type-wheel printing telegraph, issued in 1907.
In 1906 the venture became the Morkrum Company, its name combining Morton's and Krum's, which is how the arrangement was understood: Morton's money and Krum's engineering. That year Charles Krum's son Howard joined the work. Howard's contribution was the start-stop synchronizing method, which let the sending and receiving machines stay in step across a noisy telegraph line. It solved the central problem and made a practical teleprinter possible. Ballowe's book, and the publisher's description of it, say plainly that Morton "single-handedly financed early advancements of the teletype." He was one of the first private financiers of what became a vital American communications technology, and he did it without public notice from an attic over his brother's warehouse.
The milestones came quickly once the machine worked. In 1908 the Morkrum Printing Telegraph was tested on the Alton Railroad. In 1910 the company installed the first commercial teletypewriter system on Postal Telegraph Company lines between Boston and New York. In 1914 a version went into service for the Associated Press, sending news to competing New York papers. In 1925 Morkrum merged with the Kleinschmidt Electric Company to form Morkrum-Kleinschmidt. In December 1928 the awkward double name was dropped in favor of the name of the product: Teletype Corporation.
In 1930 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company bought Teletype for $30,000,000 in stock and made it a subsidiary of Western Electric. Sterling Morton, the same son who had picked the umbrella girl, had been president of Teletype. One source says he "no doubt got his job" through the family's investment, which is fair. But his name is on patents. On December 23, 1924, he and Howard Krum filed the application that became Patent No. 1,745,633, for the tape printer behind the Model 14, and in 1930 he, Krum, and Edward Kleinschmidt filed for the commercial Model 15. He had a real talent for invention.
The Model 15 stayed in production until 1963, thirty-three years without interruption. About 200,000 were built. It was the standard communications machine of the American military in the Second World War and the classic newsroom teletype, and radio stations played recordings of its clatter behind their newscasts. Its successor, the Model 33, sold more than 600,000 units together with the Model 32 and became a standard console device of the early minicomputer era, the machine on which students typed BASIC programs and watched results print back on paper.
Joy Morton died in 1934 and saw none of that. The technology he paid for in Mark's attic ended up connecting early computers to the people using them. He had invested in the movement of information much as he had invested in the movement of salt.
Air Rights
Morton thought about cities in terms of freight, of goods arriving by water and rail and of how those routes shaped the city.
When the Commercial Club of Chicago sponsored Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett's Plan of Chicago, published in 1909 and the most ambitious American city plan of its era, Morton chaired the club's railway terminal committee and met regularly with Burnham and Bennett while the plan was drafted. Railway terminals were the least glamorous part of the project. They did not involve lakefront parks or grand boulevards. They involved where the trains stopped, where freight was unloaded, and how the tracks that had divided the city since before the fire could be rearranged. Morton, who had started in salt by buying lake boats, was suited to the job.
He then served on the Chicago Plan Commission for twenty-five years, essentially the rest of his life. He argued for two ideas that were unusual for a man of his background. One was air rights, the principle that the space above a railyard could be sold and built on. His advocacy helped make it possible to construct buildings over railway lines, including the Merchandise Mart, which went up over tracks along the Chicago River. A rail corridor that had been a scar through the city became the foundation for new buildings. It is a property idea that only someone who had spent years looking at rail lines with a ledger in hand would have pursued.
The other was inland waterways. Throughout his life Morton held that canals and rivers were essential to commerce and to the growth of cities, at a time when the railroads, including the Burlington where his brothers had risen, had made canals look outdated. He backed the belief with his own freight. Before the United States entered the First World War, Morton Salt was the last firm to ship goods on the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the Hennepin Canal, moving salt from Chicago to the Quad Cities and the Mississippi. When everyone else had moved to rail, his salt barges were still on the canal.
That choice could be read as stubbornness, as nostalgia, or as a refusal to let a cheaper route fall out of use just because it was unfashionable. With Morton it was probably some of each. His business, his city planning, and eventually his philanthropy all followed the same instinct: control the route, and the product follows. He would later apply the same instinct to trees.
The House on the Hill
In Ballowe's account, Morton's private life was "equally tumultuous" to the period around him, which ran from the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the Great Depression. The family letters show the strain behind the public record.
He and Carrie raised their two children, Jean, born in 1883, and Sterling, born in 1885, in the Groveland Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Ballowe describes Carrie as generally unhappy and dealing with "degrading physical and mental conditions" that wore on her husband for years. She died in 1915 at fifty-eight. It is hard not to see a repetition of his mother's life: Caroline, lonely and depressed in a territory she never accepted, married to a man frequently away on business; Carrie, unhappy and declining in a city her husband loved. The Morton men built institutions, and the women in their homes had to live with what that required. The sources do not make the comparison, so it should be held loosely. But it is hard to ignore.
The children married into Chicago's established families. Jean married Joseph Cudahy of the meatpacking Cudahys, a fitting match for the daughter of a salt merchant, since packers were among salt's largest customers. Sterling married Sophia Preston Owsley, a granddaughter of Carter Henry Harrison, the popular post-Civil War mayor of Chicago. In 1917 Joy married Margaret Gray, who became a prominent figure in local health care and, like his children, a supporter of the arboretum.
Thornhill gave the family a place outside the city. Morton built his house on the hill where he had put out the fire and spent the following years buying the land around it. The automobile made this possible. Ballowe notes that he loved exploring Illinois by car despite frequent breakdowns. That is the same impulse that drew him to new technologies generally: the teleprinter, the anticaking agent, the motorcar. Thornhill was a place he could reach only because of a machine that often broke down, and he kept driving out regardless.
The house no longer stands. After Margaret's death, most of it was demolished in the early 1940s at the family's request so that an education center could be built on the site. One room was kept: the Founder's Room, which had been Joy Morton's library. It is now part of the Thornhill Education Center. Of the house, what remains is the room where he kept his books and his correspondence, the room where his records were kept.
A Great Outdoor Museum
He had first seen an arboretum in 1873, at seventeen, a year or so before the meningitis. His father took him to Boston to see the newly founded Arnold Arboretum, where they met its director, Charles Sprague Sargent. On a separate trip, father and son visited George Vanderbilt's Biltmore estate, home of the first school of forestry and conservation in the United States, and there J. Sterling advised his eldest son, by Ballowe's account, to use his great wealth to leave something lasting behind. J. Sterling had a talent for giving instructions that took decades to carry out.
Almost fifty years after the Boston visit, having toured gardens around the world, Joy wrote to Sargent asking for advice. Sargent took the question seriously. He urged Morton to make research the center of the institution rather than display, and he provided detailed recommendations for the plant collections and for the books a proper library should hold. The two agreed that the Morton Arboretum would exhibit the woody plants of the temperate world, educate the public about them, and study how to manage and preserve them. For the landscape design Morton hired O. C. Simonds, who had laid out Graceland Cemetery. That choice also fits: a designer of grounds meant to last indefinitely.
The trust indenture he signed on December 14, 1922, reads less like a gift letter and more like a specification:
— Trust indenture establishing The Morton Arboretum, December 14, 1922…scientific research work in horticulture … particularly in the growth and culture of trees, shrubs, vines, and grasses, by means of a great outdoor museum arranged for the convenient study of every species, variety, and hybrid of woody plants of the world able to support the climate of Illinois…
The document continues: the museum is "to be equipped with an herbarium, a reference library, and laboratories for the study of trees and other plants," all "in order to increase the general knowledge and love of trees and shrubs, and bring about an increase and improvement in their growth and culture." It specifies every species, variety, and hybrid able to survive the Illinois climate. It reads like a product specification for the whole category. The man who claimed a microscope could not distinguish his salt from different sources wanted a collection complete enough that nothing able to grow in Illinois would be missing.
He was sixty-seven and white-haired, and he could have stopped working. He did the opposite. Thousands of trees went in. Lakes were dug. Miles of road and footpath were built. The first superintendent, Clarence E. Godshalk, had finished a master's degree in landscape design at the University of Michigan in 1921, so a young man straight out of school was put in charge of the founder's largest project. That matched a habit others noticed in Morton: he liked to hire young people and promote them gradually into important positions. Years later Godshalk described what working for him was like:
— Clarence Godshalk, first director of The Morton ArboretumHe was anxious to get as much done as he could while he was living. I think that we were pushed pretty hard in the beginning.
He did not present the arboretum to the public as a moral cause, which was not how he thought. In 1926, speaking on the grounds to a Chicago Tribune reporter, he described it as an appeal to self-interest:
"I want to appeal to the gambling instinct of the American people," he said. "I want a man to come in here and say, 'What can I get out of tree planting?' I want to arouse his venturesomeness." He pointed to a stand of walnuts that was doing well. The visitor, he said, should look at the walnuts and ask himself, "What can I do now on my land that will mean something to my grandchildren thirty years hence?", then keep looking at them "until he says, I believe I'll go and do likewise."
Here a speculator in grain and cattle was recommending trees as a speculation with a thirty-year horizon. It is his father's motto put in terms a trader would recognize. J. Sterling told people to plant trees. Joy argued that planting them was a good bet.
In 1923, the year after he founded the arboretum, he gave Arbor Lodge to the state of Nebraska. After his father's death he had hired the architect Jarvis Hunt to enlarge the house into a fifty-two-room mansion and had used it as a summer home. Now the house and its sixty-five-acre arboretum became Nebraska's first state park, a monument to the man who had told a prairie to plant trees. The son had made his father's house enormous and then given it away. He kept his own monument for himself. "This Arboretum is to be my memorial," he wrote in 1932, "and I believe it will be a very permanent one."
What the Salt Paid For
Joy Morton died at Thornhill on May 10, 1934, at seventy-eight, and was buried there on the land he had bought farm by farm. The Associated Press obituary in the New York Times led with the salt and noted the trees: "Son of Arbor Day Founder Had Created Famed 419 Acre Arboretum in Illinois." In twelve years the original 175 acres had more than doubled.
He had given up the presidency of Morton Salt in 1930, the year AT&T bought Teletype, handing it to Daniel Peterkin Sr. and remaining chairman until his death. The company went on in the way companies do, losing its family identity a step at a time. It bought the Bevis Rock Salt Company in 1919 and a solar salt operation at Matthew Town on Inagua in the Bahamas in 1954. It became Morton-Norwich in 1969 and in 1982 merged with Thiokol, a rocket-propulsion company that had been founded by Bevis Longstreth, son of the family Morton had bought out in 1919. When the space shuttle Challenger broke apart in January 1986 and the cause was traced to Morton-Thiokol components, the salt company was linked for a time to a national disaster. The merger was dissolved in 1989. Rohm and Haas acquired Morton in 1999. K+S of Germany bought it in 2009 for an enterprise value of $1.7 billion. In 2021 K+S sold its Americas salt business, Morton included, to Mark Demetree's Stone Canyon Industries for $3.2 billion. The new owners cut about 40 percent of the Chicago headquarters staff, roughly 120 people, and in 2024 moved the headquarters to Overland Park, Kansas. The company now produces about 30 million tons of salt a year. For the first time since Alonzo Richmond opened his agency in 1848, it is not based in Chicago.
The city kept one building. Morton's warehouse complex at 1357 North Elston Avenue, opened in 1930 and closed in 2015, still had the umbrella girl painted on its roof. When parts of it reopened in 2022 as the Salt Shed concert venue, the developers kept the mural, reportedly because the public wanted it kept. Drivers stuck in traffic on the Kennedy Expressway can still see her walking in the rain with salt pouring out behind her.
The arboretum stayed in the family longer than the company did. Jean Cudahy succeeded her father as chairman in 1934. In 1940 she hired May Theilgaard Watts, the naturalist and writer, to lead a new education program. Jean died in 1953, leaving bequests of more than $1.5 million, much of it to charity, and Sterling became chairman. When Sterling died in 1961, his daughter Suzette Morton Davidson took over. In 1977 she retired, and Charles C. Hafner III became the first chairman from outside the family. The family governed the trust for fifty-five years. In 1963 the Sterling Morton Library opened, designed by Harry Weese, named for the son who had picked the umbrella girl and co-signed the teleprinter patents.
The arboretum also did something the Mortons had not planned. In the late 1950s Godshalk, still in charge, wanted a buffer along the western boundary on farmland the arboretum had recently acquired. He called it "a native planting." He gave the job to Ray Schulenberg, who began in 1962 to turn the old farm fields back into tallgrass prairie, using seed collected from surviving prairies nearby and matching their local genetic stock. The Schulenberg Prairie became one of the earliest prairie restorations in the Midwest. J. Sterling Morton had spent his life trying to replace prairie with forest. Forty years after his son's death, his son's institution was restoring prairie.
Today the arboretum covers 1,700 acres on both sides of Illinois Route 53. It holds more than 4,100 plant species and more than 200,000 cataloged plants and operates on a budget of about $31 million. More than thirty scientists in its Center for Tree Science study urban forests and endangered oaks, with conservation work in Mexico, Costa Rica, Vietnam, and Laos. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has designated it as its Center for Species Survival for trees. In 2024 its Plant Clinic answered more than 15,000 questions from people around the world about sick maples and shrubs that wouldn't bloom. There are sixteen miles of trails and an annual winter light show. Schoolchildren come in buses. The fire on the hilltop is not on any sign.
James Ballowe spent six years and fifty boxes of family correspondence on A Man of Salt and Trees: The Life of Joy Morton, the first full biography of the man, and he observed that in Joy's lifetime, "letter writing was not just a casual means of communication." The Mortons wrote "knowing that their correspondence might well be kept for a long period of time and read by others, or might even become part of the historical record." They were a family that expected to be remembered and wrote accordingly, much as J. Sterling advised choosing a wife, with an eye to how the line would be judged.
Behind the library that carries the son's name, a long lane runs between clipped hedges toward one of the best views on the grounds. At the far end stand four tall columns. Arboretum tradition says they represent Joy Morton and his three brothers. They are lined up together at the end of the lane: the eldest, who started slowly; Paul, who found him his first job; Mark, whose attic held the teleprinter; and the fourth. They stand in a field of trees planted with salt money, on land that was pasture when Joy first stopped there to put out a fire.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below come from a career that combined careful accounting with sharp competitive tactics, and that ended in an institution intended to outlast its founder. Some apply directly. Others carry moral costs that are noted where they appear. Morton was not a model of virtue, but he was very effective, and the methods behind that effectiveness can be separated from the cartels and favors that accompanied them. Each principle draws on the evidence above.
The principles
- 1.Buy the route, not the mine.
- 2.Read the books before you take the seat.
- 3.Let the long apprenticeship compound.
- 4.Make the commodity verifiable.
- 5.Sell the property, then let the picture tell the whole story.
- 6.Hand the next generation the judgment calls.
- 7.Fund the inventor in a spare room.
- 8.Shape the infrastructure your goods travel through.
- 9.Consolidate, but price for durability.
- 10.Write the gift like a product specification.
- 11.Appeal to venturesomeness, not virtue.
- 12.Hire young and promote slowly.
Principle 1
Buy the route, not the mine
Morton's first $10,000 did not go into producing salt. It went into an existing distributor, E. I. Wheeler & Co., and into lake boats to carry salt west. The supply already existed in the brine wells of New York and the mines of Michigan. Moving it reliably to the customers who needed it, the meatpackers, the rebuilding city, and the growing Western population, was harder and worth more.
Only after he controlled distribution did Morton move upstream into manufacturing, and by 1910 the company was both a producer and a merchant. That order matters. The distributor understands demand better than the producer does: which customers reorder, which routes freeze in winter, which grades sell. A producer who starts from the mine tends to guess. A distributor who acquires production already knows the answers.
This is also why he stayed interested in routes for the rest of his life: railway terminals in the Burnham plan, air rights over the tracks, salt barges on the Illinois and Michigan Canal after every other shipper had left. The teleprinter, viewed this way, was another route, built for information rather than freight.
Tactic: Before you build a product, look for the existing distribution chokepoint in your category and consider whether buying into it teaches you more than manufacturing would.
Principle 2
Read the books before you take the seat
When Ezra Wheeler offered the partnership in 1880, Morton did not accept right away. He went through Wheeler's books first. Only after he had seen the numbers, and connected them to the national population growth and the expanding packing industry, did he commit his father's money.
This was the result of the three-month course at Mayhew's Business College, which taught him "the value of system in recording business transactions." Many young men would have taken the partnership on the strength of the opportunity and the family connection, since Paul had made the introduction. Morton treated it as an investment decision to be checked against the records. The ledger told him things a sales pitch would not.
The same habit appears in his arboretum indenture, which specifies an herbarium, a library, and laboratories, all of them ways of keeping records. He trusted what had been written down and audited.
Tactic: Treat every partnership offer, including one that comes through family, as due diligence: insist on reviewing the actual records before agreeing to anything.
Principle 3
Let the long apprenticeship compound
At twenty-five, Morton looked like a slow starter. His younger brothers had management jobs on the Burlington. He had a series of short jobs, a three-month business course, two years of farming while recovering from meningitis, and an office position his brother arranged for him. The Chicago Reader calls him "a bit of a laggard."
But the slow start gave him exposure to the whole Midwestern commodity economy: freight by wagon, credit at a bank, survey work on a railroad, a farm's finances in good and bad years, a railroad's allocation of shipments. When he bought into a salt distributor, he already understood the businesses on every side of it, its suppliers, its carriers, its customers, and its lenders.
Within five years of arriving in Chicago he owned the firm. The years that looked wasted were preparation, and they paid off quickly once he had the right position.
Tactic: If your career looks scattered, make a list of the adjacent industries you have seen from the inside, and look for a business that sits where several of them meet.
Principle 4
Make the commodity verifiable
Salt is chemically interchangeable. The only way to make it a brand is to promise something about it that buyers can check, and Morton promised uniformity: that "inspections under a microscope cannot reveal a difference between Morton salt made in New York and Morton salt made in California."
That claim allowed the company to take salt from many sources, mines, brine wells, and solar operations, without diluting the brand. Uniformity is what made national scale possible. If every source had produced a slightly different product, Morton would have been a group of regional businesses. With a single standard, it was one national company.
The same capability had public consequences. Because Morton salt was the same everywhere and sold everywhere, it could carry iodine into kitchens across the goiter belt in 1924. Only a product consistent enough to be trusted nationally could serve that purpose.
Tactic: Identify the single quality attribute in your commodity category that customers could verify, and build your operations around guaranteeing it across every source and site.
Principle 5
Sell the property, then let the picture tell the whole story
The 1911 innovation was a single property: the salt poured in damp weather. Magnesium carbonate, the round package, and the patented spout all supported that. The advertising question was how to communicate one feature that most buyers didn't realize was missing from other salt.
Sterling Morton's answer was a picture that needed no caption: a girl, rain, an umbrella, and salt flowing freely. "Here was the whole story in a picture." The words were then cut down from a full sentence, to "Flows Freely," to "Pours," to an old proverb about misfortune, which they reversed into a promise. The image carried the claim and the slogan made it memorable.
☂
From Sentence to Slogan
How the 1914 tagline was compressed, per Morton Salt's own account.
| Candidate | Problem | Status |
|---|---|---|
| "Even in rainy weather, it flows freely" | Accurate but too long | Cut |
| "Flows Freely" / "Runs Freely" | Descriptive, forgettable | Tried |
| "Pours" | Short but without rhythm | Tried |
| "It never rains but it pours" | Familiar but negative in meaning | Reworked |
| "When It Rains It Pours" | Familiar, positive, describes the product | Shipped |
The lesson goes beyond keeping copy short. The best slogan borrowed a phrase people already knew and changed its meaning to describe the product, so the familiarity was already built in.
Tactic: Reduce your differentiator to a single image that needs no caption, then look for a common phrase you can repurpose rather than inventing a new one.
Principle 6
Hand the next generation the judgment calls
Joy Morton did not choose the umbrella girl. His son did, as company secretary in his mid-twenties, picking one of the agency's three alternates over the twelve main proposals. Sterling later served as president of Teletype and appears on its patents, including the 1924 application with Howard Krum and the 1930 Model 15 filing.
A source says Sterling "no doubt got his job" because of family money, and that is likely true. But Joy allowed his son to make choices that mattered, and those choices worked out well: the most recognizable advertising image of its century and a teleprinter that remained in production for thirty-three years. The handoff went beyond titles. Sterling was given real decisions where his judgment showed in the outcome.
The arboretum followed the same model. Jean, then Sterling, then Sterling's daughter Suzette chaired the trust in turn for fifty-five years after the founder's death. They were not caretakers. Jean hired May Theilgaard Watts and created the education program, and Sterling's name is on the library.
Tactic: Give successors specific decisions with visible consequences, such as a campaign, a product, or a hire, early enough that their judgment can be tested while you are still around to watch.
Principle 7
Fund the inventor in a spare room
The teleprinter began cheaply. Morton did not build a laboratory. He used the attic of his brother's cold-storage building and assigned an engineer who was already on the payroll there. When Pearne left after a year, the project survived because Krum stayed, and later Krum's son, who was the real inventor, joined.
That is how to fund a speculative technology without risking the main business: low overhead, borrowed space, people already employed nearby, and enough patience to continue past the first departure. From 1902 to the 1908 railroad test took six years. The AT&T sale for $30,000,000 came twenty-eight years after the first meeting.
The cost is in the Pearne dispute. His descendants say he left because Morton did not pay enough to support a family. Frugality that keeps a project alive can also drive away the people who started it. Morton came out ahead on Morkrum, but the original inventor did not share in it.
Tactic: Run speculative R&D in spare space with people already on staff, but pay the founding technical talent enough that they stay through the first difficult year.
Principle 8
Shape the infrastructure your goods travel through
Morton did not treat the city as a fixed condition. As chairman of the Commercial Club's railway terminal committee, he worked on the part of the Plan of Chicago that determined how freight entered and left the city. On the Plan Commission for twenty-five years, he pushed for air rights, so that railyards could be built over, which led to buildings like the Merchandise Mart.
He also used his own shipments to support his position. Morton Salt was the last company to use the Illinois and Michigan and Hennepin canals before the First World War. Whether or not that was strictly economical, it kept an alternative route in use and tested his claim that waterways mattered to commerce.
The principle is to take part in deciding how your inputs and outputs move. A company that helps design the terminals, the canals, and the zoning around the rail lines does not have to adapt to whatever others decide.
M
The Two Ledgers of Joy Morton
The commercial and civic careers advanced together. Key dates from the sources.
1873
Visits the new Arnold Arboretum with his father and meets Charles Sprague Sargent.
1880
Invests $10,000 as junior partner in a Chicago salt distributor. Marries Carrie Lake.
1885–89
Wheeler dies, and Morton takes ownership of Joy Morton & Co. (sources give dates from 1886 to 1889).
1902
Frank Pearne seeks backing, and the printing-telegraph work begins in Mark Morton's attic.
1906
Morkrum Company formed.
1909
Plan of Chicago published, with Morton chairing the railway terminal committee. Buys the Lisle hilltop.
1910
Incorporates Morton Salt Company. Morkrum installs the first commercial teletypewriter line.
1911
Anticaking agent added, and the Ayer campaign is commissioned.
1914
Umbrella girl and "When It Rains It Pours" appear on the package.
1922
Signs the trust indenture founding The Morton Arboretum on December 14.
1923
Gives Arbor Lodge to Nebraska as its first state park.
1924
Morton Salt introduces iodized salt nationally.
1930
AT&T buys Teletype for $30M in stock. Morton steps up to chairman of Morton Salt.
1934
Dies at Thornhill on May 10 and is buried on the grounds.
Tactic: Get a seat on the body that designs the infrastructure your business depends on, and support your positions with your own operations.
Principle 9
Consolidate, but price for durability
This principle requires the clearest caveat. Morton helped organize trusts to control salt, starch, and lumber prices. He undercut competitors on the way in and then argued against "wasteful competition." According to the Chicago Reader, he used his father's cabinet office to direct federal inspectors at rivals. None of that should be copied, and much of it would be illegal today.
The one point worth keeping is that he warned his fellow members against price gouging because he understood that excessive pricing would bring political retaliation and break up the arrangement. Even within a cartel, he wanted stability more than maximum short-term profit.
The lawful version of that idea applies to any company with pricing power, whether from a dominant brand, a network, or a necessity. Charging what the market will bear in the short run can cost the position itself in the long run. Morton Salt was still the leading American salt company a century after the trust era, and that endurance owed something to pricing restraint.
Tactic: If you hold pricing power, decide where your pricing would provoke regulators or substitutes, and stay below that level even when you could go higher.
Principle 10
Write the gift like a product specification
The 1922 indenture is a precise document. It specifies "every species, variety, and hybrid of woody plants of the world able to support the climate of Illinois," along with "an herbarium, a reference library, and laboratories." It names the method, a museum "arranged for the convenient study," and the goal, increasing "the general knowledge and love of trees and shrubs."
That precision is why the arboretum has lasted. A vague bequest invites changes in direction and erosion of purpose. A defined scope gave later directors and trustees, including Godshalk, Jean Cudahy, and the scientists who now run IUCN programs, a standard to measure decisions against. The arboretum's later expansion into tree conservation, urban forestry, and endangered oaks fits within the research mission Morton defined on Sargent's advice.
Morton also lined up governance before he died: his own chairmanship, then a family succession that lasted until 1977. The document described the mission and the board carried it out.
Tactic: When endowing anything, write the mission with enough specificity to settle disagreements fifty years later, and name a line of succession for the first several decades.
Principle 11
Appeal to venturesomeness, not virtue
His father promoted tree planting as a civic duty. Joy promoted it as an investment. "I want to appeal to the gambling instinct of the American people," he told the Tribune in 1926. "I want a man to come in here and say, 'What can I get out of tree planting?'"
That is a practical understanding of how people change their behavior. Appeals to duty mostly reach people who already agree. Appeals to self-interest, such as what this land could mean for your grandchildren in thirty years, reach the larger group who need a reason. Morton wanted visitors to look at the walnuts long enough that they decided to plant some themselves.
The rhetorical lesson works well beyond trees. For long-term or public-minded goals, the most persuasive argument often presents the action as a smart bet rather than an obligation.
Tactic: When asking people to invest in something slow and good, frame it as a bet with a visible payoff and show a working example they can see.
Principle 12
Hire young and promote slowly
Accounts of Morton's management agree that he liked to hire young people and move them up gradually into important positions. Clarence Godshalk is the clearest example. He finished his landscape design degree in 1921, became the arboretum's first superintendent, and stayed until 1966, more than thirty years after Morton died.
Godshalk's memory of being "pushed pretty hard in the beginning" shows the other side: Morton demanded a great deal from the young people he hired. But early responsibility combined with steady promotion produced unusual loyalty. The arboretum had only four executive leaders in its first hundred years. Long tenure kept Morton's direction intact well after he was gone.
Tactic: Fill your most important long-term roles with talented people early in their careers, give them real responsibility right away, and promote them slowly enough that they absorb the institution's purpose.
⚖
Salt Logic vs. Tree Logic
The same operator applied the same instincts to two very different assets.
| Instinct | In salt | In trees |
|---|---|---|
| Control the route | Lake boats, canals, rail terminals | Roads and footpaths laid across the grounds |
| Completeness | National supply from every source | "Every species, variety, and hybrid" hardy in Illinois |
| Records as infrastructure | "System in recording business transactions" | Herbarium, library, laboratories |
| Uniform standard | Indistinguishable under the microscope | Cataloged, research-grade collections |
| Appeal to self-interest | Salt that pours in the rain | Walnuts worth something in thirty years |
| Succession | Peterkin as president in 1930 | Jean, Sterling, then Suzette as chairs |
For readers who want the full record behind these principles, including the letters, the trusts, and the hilltop, Ballowe's biography is also available in a 2016 paperback edition: A Man of Salt and Trees: The Life of Joy Morton.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Joy Morton, 1932This Arboretum is to be my memorial, and I believe it will be a very permanent one.
— Joy Morton, speaking at the arboretum, Chicago Tribune, 1926I want to appeal to the gambling instinct of the American people. I want a man to come in here and say, 'What can I get out of tree planting?' I want to arouse his venturesomeness.
— Joy Morton, Chicago Tribune, 1926What can I do now on my land that will mean something to my grandchildren thirty years hence?
— Trust indenture of The Morton Arboretum, signed by Joy Morton, December 14, 1922…in order to increase the general knowledge and love of trees and shrubs, and bring about an increase and improvement in their growth and culture.
Maxims
- Own the passage. Whoever controls how a commodity moves controls more than whoever produces it.
- Audit before you commit. Read the books before you take the partnership, however good the introduction.
- Scattered years compound. A slow start spent across adjacent industries can prepare you for a fast takeover.
- Uniformity is a brand. If a product is interchangeable, make your version the one that is guaranteed the same everywhere.
- One picture, no caption. If the image needs explaining, it is the wrong image.
- Repurpose the proverb. A familiar phrase with its meaning reversed is easier to remember than a new one.
- Cheap rooms for big bets. Put speculative inventions in spare space, but pay the people who start them enough to stay.
- Help draw the map. Take a seat where the terminals, canals, and rights-of-way are decided.
- Restraint protects the position. Pricing power used without limit invites the forces that take it away.
- Plant trees. And argue for it in terms of the walnuts and the grandchildren, so that people actually do it.
