Where Have All the Chestnuts Gone?
By: Eileen Cowen
Tags: History, Food, Christmas, Culture, Trees

Chestnuts popping from their protective burrs. source: the Genetic Literacy Project

Where Have All the Chestnuts Gone?

Our songs sing their praise, our mythical holiday traditions include them in our reminisces. So, what really happened to all the chestnuts? Eileen Cowen Follow Dec 8, 2020 · 7 min read

Imagine the perfect food. Some may envision beer or bread, but for Indigenous North American tribes and early Colonial immigrants, the perfect food was the chestnut. Stories tell of early American settlers feasting on the fruit of the “bread tree,” as well as document the various uses that they acquired from Native tribal people. The American Chestnut was an incredibly important crop to all mammalian life on North America, but it almost seems like a thing of folklore today. We sing holiday songs about roasting chestnuts on an open fire, but how many of us have actually eaten chestnuts? The story of what happened to the chestnut is a sad tale of humans trying to control nature, and failing.

The American Chestnut tree was possibly the perfect tree. The immense forests of the east teemed with chestnuts. From Mississippi to Maine, you could find native chestnut trees just about anywhere. The trees grew tall and straight, averaging about 105 feet tall. They also grew fast, at least twice as fast as oaks and nearly 20% as fast as poplar. Like cedar, lumber from chestnut trees is naturally rot-resistant and was put to use in many applications. Long houses, log cabins, and canoes were often built from the sturdy hardwood. Railroad ties and fenceposts were fashioned, thanks to the straight grain of the tree. (In fact, many surmise that when Abraham Lincoln was employed making railroad ties, he was most likely using the wood of the American Chestnut.) Bark was high in tannic acid, an important element in animal hide preservation. The bark of trees was stripped from the trunk sent to tanneries. In the spring, chestnut blossoms were an integral source of pollen for honeybees. It is said that in the Smoky Mountains, there were so many blossoms that trees looked snowcapped on the 4th of July. Old-timers say it is the best honey they ever ate.

A chestnut grove, 1910. Chestnuts were called the Redwoods of the East. source: Valley Table

In addition to lumber, chestnut trees offered an extra benefit: nuts. A single tree could support a family for a year, offering anywhere from 5 to 10 bushels of chestnuts each year at maturity. Animals such as deer, bears, turkeys, and later hogs and cattle fattened up for the winter by eating an endless carpet of chestnuts from forest floors. The American chestnut itself was smaller than European or Asian chestnut varieties, but was sweeter and more flavorful. Chestnuts have a high starch content, are high in Vitamin C, and are low in fat. They can be eaten raw, roasted, or ground into flour. Chestnuts were the perfect food for rural America.

This was, of course, before the blight.

In 1904, science was moving at a rapid pace. Botanists worked especially hard to collect specimens to properly catalogue the biodiversity of the world. Often, these botanists worked independently, but many worked for institutions such as the Smithsonian, the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, and the Bronx Park (later called the New York Botanical Garden.) In the Bronx, a new specimen of chestnut tree arrived from Asia. Unknown to the botanists at the park, the Asian variety carried a blight to which the native chestnuts had no resistance. This blight had catastrophic consequences to the American Chestnut and the agrarian culture that depended on the tree.

The Devastating Spread

Botanists knew within a couple of years that there was something killing the chestnut trees, and that it came from New York City. The blight spread incredibly fast, at the rate of about 20 miles per year. Families that made the yearly winter trek to their chestnut groves found that the nuts had disappeared from one year to the next. Imagine going to harvest an abundant crop, a crop that would sustain your family both in food and in finances, only to find none where there had been hundreds. Maybe it was a fluke? Maybe there was a problem with the blossoms? They soon found out the trees were dying.

The blight unleashed a complete destruction of a crop in ways not seen previously, and there was absolutely nothing humans could do about it. It was even more environmentally devastating than the potato blight of the 1840s. Researchers estimate that 99% of chestnuts were killed by the blight, but that number, as incredible as it seems, is STILL an undercount. Out of four billion trees(4,000,000,000 trees!), only about 200 currently exist. When we talk about the devastation of the American Chestnut, it is not an exaggerated statement. Four billion trees covering two hundred million acres, and only two hundred trees stand today.

Chestnuts, hogs, apples, and moonshine

Rural America is poor. This is no surprise. There is a mythical idea about yeoman farming in America, particularly in Appalachia, that holds nostalgia for people. However, the reality is that agrarian life is difficult. (Some people call it “farm poor”… you always have enough to eat, but you are counting nickels from a Crown Royal bag for gas money.) Foraging has always been a part of rural living, as much important as fishing and hunting. In the East, chestnut forests provided not only nuts and timber: the biodiversity of the forest itself was immense. Mushrooms grew reliably, foraged fruit such as pawpaws were always ripe on time (thanks to the pollinating power of bees,) the groundcover teemed with edible green forage, and acorns dropped just before the chestnuts. In fact, the ripening of chestnuts coincided with the weeks leading up to the winter Solstice, providing a convenient feast in the waning sunlit days.

It is said that the four crops of Appalachia were chestnuts, hogs, apples, and moonshine. When the trees began disappearing in the early 20th Century, the race was on in some ways. The world was changing and people needed physical currency. For poor Appalachians, chestnuts meant access to cash, but more importantly, the nuts themselves were an important commodity. The nuts were used as currency to acquire salt, cloth, and other necessities. The forests were dying and people were relying on the chestnut more than ever. If the chestnuts disappeared, the hogs that gorged themselves on the nuts would disappear, too. It simply was not profitable to have to purchase feed for livestock. That left only two remaining crops… and moonshine was always a tricky business.

On the Ohio River, shiploads of nuts bound for New Orleans were common during the early 20th century. In 1911, a single train out of West Virginia carried nearly 155,000 pounds of chestnuts. During the Depression, people in rural Virginia took wagon loads to sell in Washington DC. It would be an incredible understatement to say that people relied on the humble chestnut: in fact, they absolutely depended on its abundance. The death of the American chestnut forests left few options in the region, and many emigrated to more opportune places.

Perhaps the saddest part of the entire story is that in just 50 years' time, an enormous bioregion that had sustained human life for thousands of years completely collapsed. The chestnut blight is widely regarded as the end of subsistence farming in the American East. Sadly, that crop loss coincided with a tumultuous time in American history: the decimation of World War I and the 1918 Influenza, the violent labor rights movements of the 1920s, the sorrow of the Great Depression, and the industrialized ramp-up to World War II. In just two generations, the great chestnut forests of the east disappeared. By 1950, the trees were considered effectively extinct. The once towering sentinels fell, leaving fairy rings of mushrooms and intrepid saplings in their wake. They serve as memories of the giants that fed the region.

American Chestnut sapling. source: EcoBeneficial

From the cradle to the grave

There was an old saying that chestnuts followed you from cradle to grave, with each wooden box made from the lumber of the solid tree. Someday, this saying may be true again. Massive efforts are currently underway to restore the American chestnut, but it is a difficult endeavor. Even today, saplings shoot up from still-living roots of long-dead chestnut trees. The saplings grow to about 15 feet in height, then the blight takes hold, creating ulcers and scabs on the young trees. Researchers and rural arborists devised ways to stem the blight, but it spreads quicker than can be squashed. Recent efforts at hybridization have successfully crossed American with Asian chestnut varieties, but the American chestnut struggles.

There is some hope.

In isolated patches across the continent, American chestnuts go about their yearly cycles. Some of those trees were planted by white migrants in the Midwest and thrive because of relative isolation from the blighted trees. Some thrive because of governmental influence, thanks to the United States Forest Service. In the early 1900s, Gifford Pinchot’s new federal program focused on species preservation as well as research into the commodity value of trees. He knew that the chestnut was important to Appalachia and brought some west to see how they would thrive in a different environment. That move may have been the most important step in the preservation of the species. Today, in the city of Portland, Oregon, four American Chestnut trees are recognized as Heritage Trees. In the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, a small grove of chestnuts still thrives at the Wind River Arboretum north of Carson, Washington.

Whether they will be the last of the American forest giants, we may never know.