“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at our nose…..”. Robert Wells, 1945
The American Chestnut tree once made up nearly 25% of the hardwood trees in our virgin forests, with a range extending from southern Maine through Georgia and as far west as the plains of Illinois. Chestnut trees, especially those growing wild in the forest, reached an age of 600 years and a height of 100 feet and were up to 10 feet across at the trunk. Their flower catkins, up to half a foot long, dotted the hillsides and ridges with splashes of creamy white in late spring and early summer and were a source of nectar for bees and other pollinators when most other flowering trees had already finished blooming. In fall, the spiny chestnut burs began to drop and provided a source of nutrition for bear, deer, turkey, squirrels, and other mammals.
What are some of the other gifts these magnificent trees have given us?
These trees and their nuts were an important part of the rural economy a century ago. People ground the nuts into flour used in baking, stuffed their holiday turkeys with them, fed them to their livestock, and sold the nuts by the truckload (a 20-million-pound yearly sale) to big cities where street venders sold roasted chestnuts throughout the holiday season. Chestnut wood is fine grained and easier to work than oak and was valued for furniture and cabinetry. The lumbered planks from a single tree could fill an entire railroad car. Families could rock their baby in a cradle fashioned from chestnut wood or bury a loved one in a coffin made of it. As rot resistant as redwood, it was often used for building log cabins, especially the lower foundation logs in contact with the ground. The bark, rich in tannins, was chipped and soaked and used for tanning the hides of bear, deer and other animals who had been fattened by the nuts. Folklore has it that chestnut wood was favored for running moonshine stills as it gives off relatively little smoke and was therefore less easily spotted by law enforcement.
These are just a few of the gifts offered by the American chestnut tree. Unfortunately, a fungus blight first detected in New York in 1904 began killing these trees off. A mile wide trench or chestnut blight “firebreak” was dug across Pennsylvania to halt the spread, but to no avail. It showed up in North Carolina in 1912. By the 1950s, four billion American chestnuts stood dead.
But thanks to an army of volunteers, including The American Chestnut Foundation founded by three plant scientists in 1983, an intensive breeding system is underway to try to bring the American chestnut back. Until then, we content ourselves with the splendor and bounty of the blight resistant Chinese chestnut or a hybridized variety. The two trees in my backyard, whose nuts I compete for with the squirrels, are likely a hybrid cross of the Chinese and American chestnut. There are not many trees that have inspired a classic American Christmas carol and we hope that our grandchildren live to see the American chestnut tree regain its place of glory in our forests.
Restoring the American Chestnut. SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 2021.
The American Chestnut Story. The American Chestnut Foundation Virginia Chapter newsletter, 2019.
The Lord of the Forest: The American Chestnut. August 31, 2012.
Smith, S. From the Wood:American Chestnuts. Penn State Extension, October 23, 2017.
