In an already dirt-poor region, chestnuts fed families and livestock, and were even used as currency.

By Jennifer Crutchfield

In the early years of the 1900s, the landscape of Southern Appalachia and the Cumberland Plateau began to look like the sort of bleak horror that families today remember from photographs of the damage from Hurricane Katrina. But the first things to fall were not homes, but massive trees—some of them over 100 feet tall, with trunks 10 feet in diameter. And the natural disaster wasn’t a storm, but a mysterious blight that raged through our region, decimating the American Chestnut and many of the societies supported by the chestnut culture.

Enormous impact

While it took two men to wrap their arms around an American Chestnut, the majestic tree’s girth paled in comparison to its economic impact. To understand the impact that the trees, their nuts and symbiotic undergrowth once made on the southeastern United States, we can look to the Mediterranean island of Corsica, which has used the chestnut tree from root to fruit since the 13th century. Some chestnuts in Corsica’s wild-growth areas are said to stand a staggering 1,600 feet tall, and the gargantuan trees are woven into the very core of Corsican culture, providing food, wine, beer, fl our, building materials and the economic base upon which the island continues to thrive.

The American Chestnut (Castanea dentate) was once a keystone species in our forest; Appalachian lore holds that a squirrel could travel the chestnut canopy from Georgia to Maine, always fed and never touching the ground. It was also one of the most important trees in the southern Appalachian Mountains, anchoring not only the forest ecosystem but also the economy of nearby communities.

When nearly 4 billion American Chestnuts on over 220 million acres succumbed to the blight, the entire culture of the region began to change. In an already dirt-poor region, the nuts fed