Morton Salt founder Joy Morton was born in Nebraska in 1855 with a silver-plated spoon in his mouth and a dual family mission: to succeed in business and to plant trees. His father, J. Sterling Morton, was a brash, politically conservative editor and big-business publicist with a Johnny Appleseed complex. He was acting governor of the Nebraska territory and secretary of agriculture (under Grover Cleveland), but J. Sterling is mostly remembered for founding Arbor Day and doing his best to turn the Nebraska prairie into something more like the forests of his boyhood home in Michigan. His 52-room Nebraska City mansion is now Arbor Lodge State Historical Park.
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Joy (it was his mother’s last name) was the eldest of J. Sterling’s four sons and a bit of a laggard at first. A University of Michigan dropout, he went to a business school run by an uncle, then knocked about in banking, railroad, and farming jobs, mostly set up by his father. He found his niche when his brother Paul (a go-getter who started as a railroad clerk and wound up as president of the Equitable Life Assurance Company) recommended him for a job at the Chicago firm of E.I. Wheeler & Co., a salt seller. When Wheeler died five years later, Joy bought out his widow and began to expand the business, buying up other firms. Under his leadership, the company developed moisture-resistant table salt and the “When it rains it pours” logo that became its calling card.
The Morton Arboretum’s 11 miles of roads and 12 miles of hiking trails will be open Christmas Day. The day after there’ll be Yule log hunts beginning with a trumpet fanfare and a rhyming list of clues and ending with carols and a hot wassail toast. If you want to pay your respects to Joy, you may have a more challenging hunt. He lies in an unmarked family plot not far from the site of the old mansion (now the education building). A park spokeswoman said there are no paths leading to the plot. She refused to give any further clues, rhyming or otherwise, to its location.
