Chestnut History

The American chestnut was once a very prominent tree in the eastern side of the U.S. Their numbers were nearly four billion and they were among the largest, fastest growing, and tallest trees around. 

Due to the wood being rot resistant and straight grained it was suitible for many areas for building material. If you could think of something that was built with wood, most likely it used to be made from chestnut wood.

The nut was able to feed everything from insects, birds, mammals and everything in-between. At one point there were newspaper articles in the late 19th century of railroad cars overflowing with chestnuts to be sold for the holiday season. 

Everything began to change around the beginning of the 20th century when the well known blight came from Asia. Since that has happened there has been no new chestnut lumber sold in the US and the multi million pound chestnut crop is now introduced from European or Asian chestnut species.

The Chinese Chestnut is native to Northern China and Korea. The tree was introduced between 1853 and 1903. This tree was able to take root in America in those times to help support the loss that came from the American Chestnut tree. Since these trees are blight resistant, they were able to grow and not die like the American chestnut

According to Chestnut Hill Nursery 

 In the early 1950s, James Carpentar,  A member of the Northern Nut Growers Association , discovered a large living American chestnut in a grove of dead and dying trees.  Carpentar was very impressed with the tree as it showed no evidence of blight infection. Over the next several years, he inoculated the tree with active blight spores and mycelia, but failed to induce any infection in the tree. 

Carpenter sent wood to Dr. Robert T Dunstan who was a well known plant breeder. Dunstan grafted these pieces to chestnut rootstock and the trees grew well. He cross pollinated these trees with three separate Chinese Chestnut trees. After these trees began to bear fruit, some trees were selected to be transported to a nursery in North Central Florida where they have been growing for over 50 years.