Memory of great forests – and hope for restoration

It was a disease that changed the very look of the landscape, much like the way the invasive woolly adelgid is wiping out the evergreen firs on our high ranges. Only the chestnut blight was even more devastating. Ecologists term it the greatest ecological disaster of the 20th century.

The forest that was

The American Chestnut was a blessing to Native Americans and early settlers in a multitude of ways. The nuts were a plentiful source of food for wildlife, people and livestock. Children used the nuts for games and as a tasty snack, particularly enjoyed when roasted.

The lumber from chestnut was almost ideal. The trunks were thick and tall, reaching great heights before branching out. Chestnut heartwood is and was legendary for resistance to rot. It did not need to be pressure-treated before being used, making it environmentally friendly.

Chestnut was used for furniture from cradles to coffins, it enclosed houses and barns, provided durable fence posts and was ideal for telegraph and telephone poles. In addition, the tannin was used to treat leather.

Writer T. Edward Nickens described the chestnut forests in an article he wrote for Our State Magazine in August 2012:

“Once, the springtime canopies of western North Carolina forests were an unmatched floral display, thanks to a tree that nearly vanished,” Nickens wrote. “The American chestnut rose 100, sometimes 120 feet above the loamy forest floor. Most were nearly barren of branches for 50 feet or better. … These were massive trunks, some 16 feet in diameter. And they lorded over the forest. In most places every fourth tree was a chestnut. … All told, perhaps 4 billion chestnut trees grew from southern Maine to Georgia, and they put on a pageant. A starburst of pearly white catkins tipped nearly every branch of the massive trees. Each catkin was nearly half a foot long, streaking like a comet’s tail against the dark surrounding foliage. In the spring, you could stand atop ridges and watch the white flowers roll like surf for miles.”

The chestnut trees were magnificent, glorious, and, as it turned out, vulnerable.

The forest that died

The demise of the American chestnut arrived in the United States around 1904 or earlier, in the form of a fungus likely carried into the country on Chinese chestnut nursery tree stocks. The fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, did little damage to chestnut trees in Asia, which had evolved strong resistance.

In the United States, it would take less than 40 years to wipe out what many considered the king tree of the forests in and near the Appalachian Range.

The fungus was first spotted on a chestnut growing in the New York Zoological Park. It invaded the tree through cracks in the bank, creating cankers, choking the tree of nutrients, eventually killing it back to the ground.

The disease spread with stunning rapidity, some 50 miles a year, killing entire stands of chestnuts down to the roots. Those root systems still survive, sending up shoots, but those shoots die within a few years. As the disease moved southward, governmental, forest and logging agencies tried to halt it, but efforts were futile.

In 1912, the Waynesville Courier reported that “vigorous efforts” were being made to keep the disease from spread to the Southern Appalachians. But by 1913, the disease was present in the state. Landowners were encouraged to try to eliminate diseased stock in hopes of slowing the disease. It took only a few years, however, to realize those efforts were hopeless.

In September 1923, even as the Waynesville Courier publisher Jesse Daniel Boone’s weekly front-page poem celebrated autumn and harvest of chestnuts, an article on the same page warned that the chestnut blight was spreading rapidly in the south.

The disease was spreading most rapidly on the east slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the article stated, adding, “Indications are that the chestnut growth of the southwestern part of North Carolina, southern Georgia and the southwestern part of Tennessee will be killed sooner than previously thought.”

The disease created a frenzy of chestnut harvest, as landowners and logging companies tried to reap chestnut timber before it deteriorated. The Department of Agriculture provided recommendations about when to harvest.

“If the stand is growing rapidly and increasing in value, it may not be advisable to cut the trees until they become infected,” the USDA reported. “In other cases where the area to be utilized is too large to cut over quickly, it will probably pay to start cutting before the blight becomes prevalent.”

Pansy Cochran Blalock, who died at the age of 95 in 2012, wrote her memories of life growing up in logging camps during the great chestnut timber harvest, the race to get some benefit from the trees before they were destroyed by blight. Born in Swain County, Pansy moved with her family to Haywood County, living along Dix Creek where her father farmed and helped log out timber, especially the dying chestnuts.

“In the summer we played in the flumes that were used to get acid wood down where trucks could pick it up,” she wrote in a journal featured in a Mountaineer story in 2003. “They were made in a trough shape and put in the creek where they made the acid wood. As it came on down the creek, it was elevated with braces. The water was swift that came through it, but sometimes the wood piled up in it and someone had to walk the flume and start the wood on down. When the men weren’t working, we kids would get on a stick of wood and ride.”

“Acid wood” technically refers to any wood that could provide tannin for treating leather and other purposes, but many older mountaineers commonly used the term to refer to the wood harvested during the chestnut blight.

Champion’s pulp and paper mill in Canton had developed ways to use chestnut wood for paper production and produced a by-product, tanning acid. The late C.W. Hardin, historian for the mill and former mayor of Canton, wrote that “by 1929, Champion was the largest producer of this acid in the world.”

The blight forced Champion to develop new techniques for paper production.

“Up until the time when this chestnut blight struck, no paper industry had produced successfully from pine a highly bleached printing type paper,” Hardin wrote. “Champion pioneered and developed for the first time a process for using fibers from the pine tree family in the production of high quality paper.”

The forest restored?

By the 1940s, the blight had wiped out more than 99% of the great American chestnuts, and new generations would grow up without knowing the great forests of the past. But their great-grandchildren may once again experience that magnificence. Hope has remained through the fact that many of the root systems of these great trees survive, sending forth shoots that grow for a few years before succumbing to the blight.

The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) is leading the effort to restore the great tree. TACF has crossed the American chestnut with a Chinese variety of chestnut highly resistant to the blight.

After generations of development, the result is a tree that is genetically mostly American Chestnut while retaining some resistance to blight, though the organization has found that blight resistance is more genetically complicated than first hoped, slowing the effort. Some of those plantings exist in Haywood County.

Other studies have focused on the very, very few American chestnut trees that survived into maturity without succumbing to the blight. And other studies focus on discoveries that the Chestnut blight fungus can itself be infected by a virus, reducing the fungus’ lethal effects.

So while this generation may never see the great chestnut forests restored, hope is strong that one day the long feathery blooms of the American chestnut will glorify mountain slopes in spring, and that their nuts will again blanket forest floors in autumn.

Sources for this story include: The website for The American Chestnut Foundation, acf.org; “The Lord of the Forest: the American Chestnut, Our State magazine, September 2012; numerous articles from the Waynesville Courier and The Waynesville Mountaineer through 1948; “Champion changed Way of Life in Canton” by C.W. Hardin, Canton Biannual Review, The Mountaineer, Dec. 22, 1993; “Thriving in the Mountains,” a feature on Pansy Blalock, The Enterprise Mountaineer, June 27, 2003.