Dec 9, 2022 3 min read

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. They were a source of nectar for bees and other pollinators when most other flowering trees had already finished blooming. In the fall, the spiny chestnut burs began to drop and provided a source of nutrition for bears, deer, turkeys, squirrels and other mammals.

What are some of the other gifts these magnificent trees have given us?

These trees and their nuts were essential to 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 vendors 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 to tan the hides of bears, deer and other animals that the nuts had fattened. 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 gifts the American chestnut tree offers. Unfortunately, a fungus blight, first detected in New York in 1904, began killing these trees. A mile-wide trench or chestnut blight “firebreak” was dug across Pennsylvania in an effort to halt the spread but to no avail. It showed up in North Carolina in 1912. By the 1950s, 4 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.