• Until recently, chestnut trees dominated eastern hardwood forests, with an estimated three to four billion trees across more than 30 million acres. Known as “redwoods of the East,” chestnuts grew fast and tall, reaching 100 feet (30 m) in height, with diameters exceeding 12 feet (3.7 m). They lived for an average two to three centuries.
• Their bold-grained, blondish wood was strong, easily worked, and extremely rot-resistant, used in everything from barn timbers to pianos, split-rail fences to fine furniture (in which it was often veneered with more fashionable woods like mahogany). Timbermen loved it for re-sprouting readily from the stump and reaching diameters of two feet or more in little over half a century; an oak on similar soils would take a couple of centuries to add as much wood. “By the time a white oak acorn has made a baseball bat, the chestnut stump has made a railroad tie,” one advocate boasted.
• A mature chestnut’s sweet, carroty-tasting nuts—as many as 6,000 from a single tree each autumn— were nearly a perfect food for both settlers and their livestock, as well as an array of wildlife including deer, squirrels, turkeys, and bears. The nuts are high in fiber, vitamin C, protein, and carbohydrates, and low in fat.
• The Romans ranked chestnuts alongside the olive tree and the grapevine as plants important to civilization. Their profusion of blooms supported honeybees and other pollinators. And because chestnuts blossom relatively late, their nut crop was never hit by the late frosts that often diminish the nut crop of oaks and hickories. Forester George Hepting remarked, “Not only was baby’s crib likely made of chestnut, but chances were, so was the old man’s coffin.”
• American chestnut trees were one of the most abundant species throughout the eastern U.S. About 24% of the trees in the forests stretching from Maine to Florida were chestnuts. More than a thousand place names containing the word chestnut remain throughout the Appalachians, which were the heart of the species’ range.
• In 1904, the New York City Zoological Park in the Bronx imported and planted a species of chestnut tree native to Asia. But the Zoological Park imported a different species of chestnut tree. It turns out that a fungus now called chestnut blight had grown up with chestnuts throughout Asia, and over the eons, the Asian chestnut trees had developed a resistance to the blight and were little affected. But the American chestnut trees had never encountered this blight, and therefore had no resistance. Although the roots of the trees remained unharmed, and sent up new shoots, the newly sprouted trees also fell victim to the blight.
• The blight spread at the rate of 50 miles (80 km) per year. Over nine million acres of chestnut forest was destroyed. By the 1950s, the American chestnut tree was nearly extinct and remains so today. Today researchers are working to save the chestnut trees by growing hybrids, by developing tree vaccines, by altering DNA, by breeding chestnuts that survived the epidemic due to natural resistance, and by releasing a different type of blight that attacks the original kind of blight.
• Importing the original Asian chestnuts is not an option because they are low-growing, bushy species that are not winter-hardy.
• Today, native chestnuts are found only in areas in the Midwest and West that have been shielded from the spread of chestnut blight.
