Joy Morton's Thornhill

The Morton Arboretum was paid for with salt. In 1880 Joy Morton put his life savings of ten thousand dollars into E. I. Wheeler and Company, a Chicago salt agency; when Wheeler died in 1885 he bought out the interest and renamed the firm for himself, and it was incorporated as the Morton Salt Company in 1910. Its girl with an umbrella and its line about rain and pouring, both adopted in 1914, became one of the most recognised trademarks in the American grocery trade. In 1909 Morton bought country land at Lisle, about twenty five miles west of Chicago, and built an estate he named Thornhill after the slope of hawthorns it looked over, to a design by Jarvis Hunt. On 14 December 1922 he established an arboretum on the grounds. It now covers about 1,700 acres, with some 500 acres of plant collections set among 900 acres of woodland, prairie, meadow, lakes and streams, and holds one of the most diverse tree collections in North America. The idea came down through the family rather than arriving with the money: Joy's father was J. Sterling Morton, who founded Arbor Day in Nebraska in 1872, served as Secretary of Agriculture under Grover Cleveland, and called his own estate Arbor Lodge. Most of the Thornhill house was razed in the early 1940s and an education centre put up in its place, but the library Morton added in 1923 was kept and stands inside that building still, panelled in English oak, as the Founder's Room.