The American Chestnut Tree

Think of an overlook in the pure sense of the word as verb—to overlook, to look over. Not just a pleasant view but a place that allows your eye to do what it loves best, to see as far as it can see. It’s a place that allows a sense of vastness, a place that heals and provides.

Now imagine you're a person living along the Appalachian range in the first few decades of our last century. A Native person dependent on the chestnut for critical medicinal purposes or to make your ancestral chestnut bread, or a colonist used to bartering for necessities with nuts that fall in abundance like dandelion seeds in the wind. Now imagine you’re in Appalachia, living in the first few decades of our last century. And that overlook—that place you have watched for years and are charged with watching over—is rapidly contracting with one magnificent tree after the next rusting over or already dead.

This is what happened when the beloved American chestnut was hit with a deadly blight. Within 50 years, a wickedly contagious and fatal disease  raced through the forests, casting orange flecks onto tree after tree after tree, leaving not just the chestnut trees but the beings—both human and not who depended on them—decimated and devastated.

Considered by many ecologists to be the most useful tree to ever grow on this earth, timber from its rot-resistant wood is even now, a hundred years later, often still as strong as ever and standing tall in barns. And the nuts packed a wallop of calories for countless mouths, many of whom starved with their food source gone.

Witnessing the blight, people thought it the end of the world, and in some ways, they were right. Before, there was an estimated four billion—that’s billion, with a “b”—American chestnut trees, but nearly all succumbed to the canker and spore racing through the forest.

So, is the American chestnut extinct? Is that how the story ends? Well, yes and no. Because the blight has no effect on the tree’s root system, these trees still persist, even now. But the blight almost always catches up to them before they can attain their stature, reducing our most prolific and magnificent trees to an early-successional-stage shrub.

Bright and hopeful minds are—and have been for decades—working to fortify the American chestnut. By combining the results of various methods, including inserting genetic material into American chestnuts to confer blight resistance, utilizing traditional breeding methods to select for optimal survivability, and weakening the blight itself through strategic viral infection, scientists have been exploring multiple convergent pathways to resistance.

And this is where the good folks who have been doing this work—the American Chestnut Foundation—and the Hellbender Gathering—comes in. Because every year, as part of our gathering, the foundation will provide one of those seeds or seedlings to us so that we can plant it with all of the tenacity and optimism it will take to survive this time. So come, get your hands dirty, not just with ink but with dirt.

Restoration isn't certain, but that certainly doesn’t mean we won’t try and try again each and every year. And as the years pass, who knows? Maybe in six to ten years after planting one of those trees we’ll witness the nuts falling from those branches.

As the years pass, let us bless those trees and watch them grow. If they don’t survive, they won’t die without us bearing witness. And if they do survive, may they live to be as strong and tall as the trees that once grew here in these mountains. And may we do one of the best things any of us can do—plant a tree that we may well never get to sit under but that future generations may relish and protect.