Nature Bulletin No. 371-A   February 28, 1970
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
George W. Dunne, President
Roland F. Eisenbeis, Supt. of Conservation

****:CHESTNUT BLIGHT

Imagine what our forest preserves would be like if all the oaks died! 
That is what happened to the millions of chestnut trees that were 
formerly so plentiful from southern Maine and Ontario to Georgia; 
west to Indiana, southern Michigan and northern Mississippi; and 
especially in the Appalachian chain of mountains, That is why the 
discovery of the oak wilt disease which has killed so many oaks here in 
Cook County and in at least 18 states, has thrown foresters and lumber 
men into such a dither.

Years ago on cold winter nights families would sit around the fireplace 
and roast chestnuts in the embers. On the street corners downtown 
they were sold, piping hot, for a nickel a bag. Those sweet-flavored 
kernels were a delicacy. Although the "spreading chestnut tree" in 
Longfellow's poem about the village smithy happened to be a horse 
chestnut, it is true that the streets in many New England villages were 
shaded by big wide-spreading American Chestnut trees. They were one 
of the most common and valuable trees in the forests. Not now! 
They're kaput.

In 1937 we traveled the Skyline Drive along the crest of the Blue 
Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park The views were 
magnificent but we were shocked and saddened to see the graveyard of 
a forest. The mountain sides were thick with bare weather-bleached 
snags of dead chestnut trees. Their gaunt trunks, some of them huge 
and with a few of the larger limbs remaining, rose like tombstones 
above dense tangles of undergrowth and vines. Around the base of 
most dead snags and fallen monarchs were thickets, often 10 to 15 feet 
across, of young chestnuts -- apparently sprouted from the long-lived 
roots of the parent trees. Some probably had sprung up during the 
preceding year, others were larger and occasionally there was one 3 or 
4 inches in diameter but on the stems of these were the ugly cankers 
formed by the blight-causing fungus that kills the inner bark, and 
many were already dead or dying.

The American Chestnut and the smaller, more bushy Chinquapin of 
our southeastern states, are two of seven species of chestnuts native in 
the northern hemisphere. Suited to a wide variety of soils, the former 
attained greatest size in the southern Appalachians where one monster 
was reported to have a trunk diameter of 10 feet and trees with 
diameters of 5 or 6 feet, from 80 to 100 feet high, were not 
uncommon. The tapering trunk had several large branches, often 
horizontal when growing in the open, to form a broad, somewhat 
pyramidal crown. The leaves were from 6 to 8 inches long, about 2 
inches wide, with coarse hooked teeth along the edges. In early 
summer, it bore long spiky catkins of male flowers and shorter catkins 
of both male and female flowers followed by the fruit: 2 or 3 nuts 
enclosed in a bur covered with long needle-sharp branched spines, The 
wood, though coarse, light and not very strong, was very durable and 
desirable for posts, telegraph poles, railroad ties and other purposes, 
Chipped-up chestnut wood was one of the principal sources of tannin, 
used in tanning leather, the chips then being used to make pulp for 
paper or cardboard.

The blight was first discovered near New York City in 1904, before w 
e had plant quarantine laws, probably from fungus on young chestnuts, 
imported from China or Japan, which are resistant to it. It spread like 
wildfire. Today there are only a very few mature American chestnuts 
alive -- notably in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and southern Illinois. 
The disease ravaged Italy where the European chestnut, as a nut 
producer, ranked next in value to the grape vine and olive tree.  
Somep'n like communism, eh?