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Chestnut History

For hundreds of centuries the American chestnut reigned dominant and supreme in the great eastern forest. Since the ice age, the American Chestnut comprised 25% of the forest from Maine to Georgia and from the mouth of the Hudson to the Ohio Valley. Every fall was a bountiful harvest. Mouse, bear and human; deer, squirrel and coon, everyone feasted on chestnuts as other activities ceased.

When Europeans arrived the trees began to be cut for firewood, fuel and construction. The wood was lighter than oak but just as strong and very resistant to rot. The trees grew straight and tall, the easier to cut and mill. Houses, churches, barns and warehouses by the thousands were built between 1600 and 1900, many still in use today. The bark was high in tannin/tannic acid and saw heavy use in hide processing. Chestnuts were a staple of the settler diet and easy picking for children and elders intent on contributing to the family table. Recipes using chestnuts and chestnut flour were common among both rich and poor.

Hybrids

Beginning with Thomas Jefferson, many arborists of the 19th Century tried to cross the size of the European chestnuts with the sweetness of the American chestnuts. Hybrids were sold bare root by mail orders until the appearance of the chestnut blight and the beginning of the 20th Century. Neither the tree species not the hybrids, were spared by the blight.

The Blight

Sadly, the Asian Chestnut Blight, a deadly fungus, arrived in the New York area and proved fatal to nearly every American Chestnut tree encountered. By 1940, 4.5 billion chestnut trees had died in what was termed the worst natural disaster in North American history. A major source of food, timber and tannic acid was gone from the landscape, with less than 50 mature trees remaining within the former natural range, and there was no recovery in sight. The blight is present to this day in the eastern forest, killing any chestnut seedling brave enough to reach a few inches in diameter. Valiant efforts have been made over the years to develop a blight resistant tree, through inoculation and crossbreeding, with real success still in the future.

Prior to the arrival of the blight, however, the settling of the American west meant that chestnuts were often planted in homesteads and farms from Wisconsin to California. Most often the trees did not survive in the drier and hotter climates found by the immigrants. Just as the Great American Desert and the Rocky Mountains were an insurmountable barrier to most eastern plants, American Chestnuts (and eventually the blight itself) found nearly all of the American West an unsuitable growing environment. Here and there, a garden tree might be successfully tended if the conditions were right, but easy success was rare.

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