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Blight wiped out the American chestnut. Parallel efforts are close to bringing it back.

The Washington Post December 18, 2019

Adrian Higgins

It is hard to overstate the value and cultural importance of the American chestnut tree for those who came before us.

The native hardwood was once so ubiquitous, it has been said, that a squirrel could travel from Maine to Georgia in the chestnut canopy. The largest trees, spreading 100 feet or more, dropped 10 bushels of nuts, and in the fall the ground was covered with a nut blanket four inches deep, writes sociologist Donald E. Davis in a 2005 paper.

The bears and turkeys feasted, the farmer’s hogs feasted, and the people who lived in chestnut territory feasted — on that sweetened Appalachian ham but also on the economic value of the trees and their nuts. The chestnut’s arrow-straight timber was valued for its size and rot resistance and today endures in the posts and beams of old farmhouses and barns.

For us city folk, the chestnut evokes everything that is nostalgic about yuletide season, the notion of a vendor plying hot roasted chestnuts on a street corner. The aroma, the warmth in the hand, the nutty flavor all conjure one of the more cuddly images of a Dickensian world.

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