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In the early 20th century the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) dominated the forests of the eastern U.S. It was a tree so magnificent, honorable, and invaluable that it was considered an ecological keystone up and down the Appalachian range. American chestnuts were magnets of life, “fundamental to the livelihood and culture of both Indigenous people and European-Americans.” What truly set this “King of the Forests” apart was its reliable bounty of delicious nuts. Its rot-resistant and straight-grained wood was coveted for building beams, railroad ties, fence posts, flooring, furniture, and telephone poles. Chestnut leaves were an essential food source for many butterflies and moths, and the late-blooming flowers provided abundant nectar for pollinators. The leaves and twigs were a crucial browse for nearly all of our native mammals.
This incredible bounty was in part the fruit of the labor of generations of Native American Indians. According to Charles Mann in his book 1491:
“Sometime in the first millennium A.D., the Indians who had burned undergrowth to facilitate grazing began systematically replanting larger belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit and mast (the general term for hickory nuts, beechnuts, acorns, butternuts, hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, and chestnuts)…
“Within a few centuries, the Indians of the eastern forest reconfigured much of the landscape from a patchwork game park into a mix of farmland and orchards…
“In colonial times, as many as one of every four trees in between southeastern Canada and Georgia was a chestnut – partly the result, it would seem, of Indian burning and planting.”
American chestnut trees produced an estimated 20 million pounds of nuts per year, a natural bounty that fed generations of especially poor Appalachian communities. In late fall, the forest floor was entirely covered with burrs and nuts. Charlotte Ross of the University of Appalachia found letters from early Irish settlers reporting the astounding abundance of the chestnut crop:
“The chestnut mast is knee-deep…
“A man fell waist deep in the mast and had to be pulled out…
“Did game fatten on the chestnut? Lord have mercy, yes. Rabbits were so fat and lazy a child could fetch one in with a chucking stone.”
The truly massive annual chestnut harvest also filled train cars supplying major U.S. cities in the late 19th century. Livestock farmers would gather baskets of chestnut to feed their herds and “would turn their hogs loose in the forest to fatten up on the nuts.” It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the American chestnut ecologically, culturally, and economically.
In 1904, a Chestnut blight caused by the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica was discovered at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens after mistakenly being brought over from East Asia. It spread quickly, killing one American chestnut after another. Within 25 years, over four billion American Chestnut trees died. Today, they are functionally extinct – stump sprouts remain but ultimately succumb to the blight. The blight not only wiped out this majestic tree, but also the cultural and economic values that developed over countless generations.
We have mostly forgotten how versatile and nutritious chestnuts are, not to mention how to eat them. Fortunately, we still have old chestnut recipes and chestnut culture and cuisine are still alive and well in many other parts of the world where blight-resistant chestnut species continue to thrive. Pioneering farmers and researchers in the Midwest and Northeast have been growing different cultivars of these trees in the U.S. for decades, and selecting the ones best-adapted to bring back locally-grown chestnuts to our land and our cuisine.
Find out more about our approach to farming and land stewardship.
