American Chestnut Tree Revival

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PHOTO: PATTI MURRAY/EARTH SCENES
The majestic American chestnut tree showing its fall colors.

Perhaps as schoolchildren, we recited the words of Longfellow’s immortal poem: “Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands.” In recent years, the village smithy–or anyone else–would find few such trees to stand under. The mighty American chestnut tree, known scientifically as Castenea dentata, has been laid low by a fungus called Endothia parasitica, or, simply, chestnut blight.

The majestic chestnut once made up one-fourth of all the trees in the forests from Maine to Georgia. Chestnut was once called the “redwood of the east.” Straight and rot-resistant, its timber was used to make telephone poles, railroad ties, furniture, and even musical instruments. The chestnut is credited with sustaining the economy of rural Appalachia in the nation’s formative years, providing food as well as lumber for building barns and fences. Even its bark was used to make tannin for leather.

“The story is that the chestnut supported from cradle to grave,” says Bill Alexander, landscape curator of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. “You were rocked to sleep as a baby in a chestnut cradle and you were buried in a chestnut casket.”

Demand for chestnuts, known for their flavor, grew quickly, and railroad cars carrying large shipments of the nuts would leave the mountains for the city where street vendors roasted them. They were also popular in holiday recipes. We remember the Christmas song with the opening line: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”

But beginning in 1904, all this was to come to a slow but certain end. A fungus that caused blight was discovered in a shipment of imported Chinese chestnuts. The blight spread about fifty miles south each year, killing every chestnut in its path. By the 1940s, the blight has invaded all of the eastern forests, killing the trees on which it lived back to the roots, leaving the tree at the point of virtual extinction. In the 1950s, the American Chestnut Foundation recognized that though the tree had been essentially eliminated as a forest tree, the root system was not affected by the blight. Sprouts from old trunks can grow twenty feet high and six inches in diameter before they succumb.

  • Published on Aug 1, 1998
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