By Staff
My dad had a thing for chestnut trees. I remember as a kid, every fall we'd go up by Hartford to collect chestnuts from this humongous old tree that stood alongside a gravel road. On special evenings dad would break out a few of his treasured chestnuts and roast them in the fireplace. Quite frankly, I didn't share his enthusiasm for the nuts. In my book they were subsistence fodder at best. I also remember his ire when the county cut the tree down to make way for a power line. For years he searched for another tree but every rumor and lead turned out to be the much inferior import, Chinese chestnut.
The American chestnut was the most regal of our deciduous trees. Growing over 100 feet tall and up to 10 feet in diameter, they dominated the Eastern forests. They grew throughout the eastern U.S. and westward to Ohio. In the Appalachians, the heart of chestnut country, pure stands of enormous chestnuts extended for miles. One early Spanish explorer wrote, "Where there be mountains there be chestnuts."
Chestnut trees were an extremely important commodity. The wood is lighter in weight than oak yet nearly as strong and is as rot resistant as redwood. It was the wood of choice for fencing, railroad ties and utility poles. It was also used in everything from furniture to shipping crates. It was often 50 fifty feet to the first limb on those old growth chestnuts and it was reported an entire railroad car could be filled with the lumber from one log. Many considered the large, wholesome nuts the sweetest and most tasty of all nuts (they obviously hadn't tried cashews, pistachios and macadamias). Folks would fill their attics with bags of chestnuts and thousands of tons of roasted chestnuts were sold by city street vendors just as hot dogs are today. On another front, tannic acid from chestnut bark and wood was a key ingredient for leather tanning. It was the do it all tree.
Then in 1904 the magnificent chestnuts at the Bronx Zoo in New York City suddenly died. The dreaded Asian chestnut blight had landed in America, brought in by horticulturists importing the Chinese chestnut which is resistant to the blight. Chestnut blight is a fungus closely related to Dutch elm disease. The fungus grows in the cambium layer, the outer sapwood which supplies nutrients to the tree. In defense, the tree forms callus tissue, which is basically dead wood, around the fungus to try and contain it. However, the fungus grows faster than the tree can keep up with. Eventually this callus tissue forms all the way around the tree trunk, cutting off the flow of nutrients to the upper tree. It's like being girdled from the inside. The tree then quickly dies.
The blight went on a rampage, the wind blown spores spreading throughout much of the East within just a few years. All attempts to contain it failed. By the 1930s the core range of the chestnut had been gutted. Loggers, figuring the chestnut's demise inevitable, joined in the carnage to try and beat the blight to the remaining trees. By 1950 every American chestnut, an estimated 3.6 billion trees, within its natural range was gone. The only ones left were a few individual trees planted outside its range, including here in Michigan. Eventually, most of them succumbed, too.
Fortunately, the blight does not kill the roots so chestnuts are not doomed to extinction. Tenacious chestnuts continue to throw up shoots. The shoots die far before maturity but at least scientists have stock to work with. Through a complex procedure of crossing with the blight resistant Chinese chestnuts they are now coming up with blight resistant chestnuts that display nearly all the attributes of the American chestnut. Scientists are also working with a naturally occurring virus that weakens the blight fungus, making it less lethal.
A few transplanted American chestnuts still exist here in Michigan. If you get in the mood for chestnuts roasting on an open fire there's one in Grand Haven, several in Cadillac and a handful scattered around in Manistee County, to name a few. Carpe diem.