DOI: 10.5061/dryad.h70rxwdrr
title: Primary source documentation of the American Chestnut Blight in Tennessee, 1905 - 1950

description: This datasets was collected for a case study that sought to reconstruct
 the spatio-temporal spread of the American chestnut blight in Tennessee by
 collecting, reconciling, and analyzing heterogeneous archival and special
 collections materials from 1904 to 1950, the major period of infection and
 tree loss. Using the spread of the American chestnut blight in Tennessee
 as a case study, the project explored the potential for archival resources
 to serve as proxy data sources for the compilation of historical climate
 datasets.
description: The spread of the American chestnut blight in Tennessee was
 recreated using data obtained from the archival record. Digitized primary
 source materials were gathered through keyword searches in Chronicling
 America, Google Books, the National Agricultural Library Digital
 Collections, Newspapers.com Southeast Edition, Open Parks Network,
 ProQuest Historical Newspapers, the Tennessean Archives, Tennessee Virtual
 Archive, University of Tennessee Digital Collections, University of
 Memphis Digital Commons, Archives of Appalachia, and the digital
 collections listed on the Tennessee Archives Directory webpage. The
 initial keywords used to locate relevant resources were selected according
 to the Library of Congress authorities file for the American chestnut
 tree. These topical terms include the subject heading American chestnut
 and the tracing and reference terms American chestnut tree, Castanea
 dentata, and Castanea. Other keywords were identified from the metadata
 and text of relevant primary sources. These include chestnut, chestnut
 blight, American chestnut blight, and Chestnut bark disease. When
 necessary, search parameters limited results to only artifacts published
 in Tennessee between 1904 and 1950. Once relevant
 sources were compiled through keyword searches, the resulting set was
 further filtered according to several criteria: a source had to mention a
 tree or stand at a specific date, location, and condition (alive,
 blighted, or dead). Additionally, a source had to indicate that the tree
 it mentioned was an American chestnut and not an Asian chestnut, European
 chestnut, horse chestnut, chestnut oak, sweet chestnut, or water chestnut.
 The identified trees and stands were then geocoded with Excel’s MapCite
 add-in, and the documents were classified in a spreadsheet according to
 the following variables: date, location, latitude, longitude, chestnut
 status, document type, document title, search terms, source, website, and
 URL. Evidence of pre- and post-blight tree stands found in the archival
 record thus informs a spatial-temporal recreation of the blight at a local
 scale.
description: # Primary Source Documentation of the American Chestnut Blight in
 Tennessee, 1905 - 1950
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h70rxwdrr](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h70rxwdrr) ## Description of the data and file structure This repository contains the complete raw data used to model the socio-temporal spread of the American chestnut blight, as recorded in the human record. Measured variables include date, location, latitude, longitude, chestnut status, document type, document title, search terms, source, website, and URL. Latitude and longitude entries support spatial modeling, while the date entry supports temporal modeling. The file is compatible with GIS software, Jupyter Notebooks, and RStudio. No codebook is needed to interpret the dataset. ## Sharing/Access information Data was derived from the following sources: * Chronicling America * Google Books * National Agricultural Library Digital Collections * Newspapers.com Southeast Edition * Open Parks Network * ProQuest Historical Newspapers * Tennessean Archives * Tennessee Virtual Archive * University of Tennessee Digital Collections * University of Memphis Digital Commons * Archives of Appalachia