October 22, 2021
There is a chestnut tree, nestled among the cedars in our sheep pasture, that has been raining down nuts as fast as we can collect them. I suspect it’s an early experimental hybrid that my Dad planted 40 or more years ago. It clearly has a strong American Chestnut influence, so I sent a sample off to the American Chestnut Foundation to see if they want any of the nuts. I’m sure it will be a while before we hear back from them, but just on the off chance that they do want them, we’ve been scrambling to collect them before the pigs, the deer, the turkeys, and the squirrels consume them.
Until the arrival of the Chestnut Blight in the early 1900s, the American Chestnut dominated the east coast from Maine to Florida. They were enormous trees that easily lived up to their nickname as “the Redwood of the East”. Old growth trees lived hundreds of years, grew up to 12 feet in diameter and were well over 100 feet tall.
Unlike oak trees which have unpredictable yields – with “mast years” of strong nut production followed by years of lack luster production, the chestnut tree produced massive amounts of nuts each and every year. As many as 6,000 nuts per tree, per year, for hundreds of years. The nuts were low in oil so once dried, they were easy to store, and would last for years. What an amazing source of sustenance for man and beast!
The timber was rot resistant and ideal for building log cabins and fencing. The lumber was light weight and strong. The logs split easily for firewood and the bark was used for tanning hides. I can’t imagine a tree more crucial to the earliest New England subsistence farmers nor how absolutely devastating the blight must have been to the mountain communities that still depended on the tree when the blight arrived.
The Chestnut blight was first discovered in New York City in 1904 and it spread outward in concentric circles from there. The mighty American Chestnut that had triumphantly dominated an entire region for over 40 million years was absolutely decimated in just under 50.
By the time the Great Depression arrived the blight had already ripped through the Blue Ridge Mountains, destroying not just the trees but a whole way of life. It’s no wonder coal companies were able to move in and find cheap land and cheap labor.
Now, a century later, the American Chestnut Foundation is replanting acres of chestnut hybrids on the barren wasteland left behind from the coal industry. My Dad’s family moved away from West Virginia during that era so it would be especially fitting to able to contribute the genetics from his tree to that restoration effort.
We have the nuts in cold storage, on the off chance that the Foundation wants them - but if they don’t, the pigs are standing by - more than willing to pay homage to the Great American Chestnut in their own very appreciative way.