Spring is in the air (along with the occasional snow flurry)…and that brings one thing to the minds of us here at The Henry Ford – PENNY PINES!

Ah, yes, it is the time of year when Greenfield Village staff and a troupe of our dedicated volunteers bag up and hand out thousands (yes, thousands!) of seedlings to any and all guests who wish to take one home and plant it.

You see, The Henry Ford partners with the United States Forest Service (USFS), which sponsors such programs as the USFS Ranger Program during our Summer Celebration, National Get Outdoors Day, Arbor Day – and the distribution of penny pines.

What are penny pines, you might ask? In the mid-1930s, forest service employee Margaret March-Mount worked with women’s clubs and school children to encourage fire prevention and tree planting.  She created the Pennies for Pines Children’s Conservation Crusade, which encouraged children to give pennies for planting pine trees in national forests.  For every $4 received, the USFS could plant 1,000 seedlings.

Today, our penny pines program is set up under the overhang of the Greenfield Village Store.  It runs seven days a week, with the exception of our Day Out With Thomas weekends, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and will continue until the trees are all gone.

This year, we have FOURTEEN varieties of trees, rather than the two or three varieties that we have had in the past – wow!  This wide variety allows us to share the importance of not planting a mono-culture, or single variety of tree; when planting only one variety of anything, we limit our ability to recover, should an agricultural disaster arise.  Here in Michigan and in many other places across the country, we learned this the hard way a few years back during the tragic Emerald Ash Borer infestation – according to the USDA, the Emerald Ash Borer was responsible for the death or decline of tens of millions of ash trees in 14 states across the Midwest and Northeast.

So the next time you’re at Greenfield Village, feel free to stop by, ask a question and/or take a tree – but make sure you hurry, because when they’re gone, they’re gone!