History
The practice of cultivating evergreens specifically to sell as Christmas trees dates back to 1901, when a 25,000 tree Norway Spruce farm was sown near Trenton, New Jersey. The commercial market for Christmas trees had started fifty years earlier when a farmer from the Catskill Mountains brought trees into New York City to sell. Despite these pioneering efforts, most people still obtained wild-grown Christmas trees from forests into the 1930s and 1940s. More trees were grown in plantations after World War II, and by the 1950s farmers were shearing and pruning trees to meet customer demands. The Christmas tree market burgeoned through the 1960s and 1970s, but from the late 1980s onward prices and the market for natural Christmas trees declined. In the early 21st century, nearly 98 percent of all natural (non-artificial) Christmas trees sold worldwide were grown on tree farms.
Read more about this topic: Christmas Tree Cultivation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)