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Chestnut HISTORY
Long before European immigrants introduced their chestnut species in the United States, the American chestnut played an important role in the culture of Native Americans and represented a critical dietary component for a wide array of forest animals.
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Once blanketing vast portions of the eastern U.S., the American chestnut was most strongly rooted in the soils of the Southern Appalachians, where dense stands of towering trees offered refuge for countless animals and every fourth hardwood was a chestnut. Prized for its copious crop of edible nuts, the American chestnut was also utilized in the charcoal and tannin industries of its day.
Mature trees could grow branch-free for fifty (even up to one hundred) feet, and average diameters approached five feet. Highly valued for its straight, rot-resistant wood, these giant specimens supplied the lumber for most barns and homes east of the Mississippi for three centuries.
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When an Asian fungus was inadvertently introduced in1904, a "chestnut blight" swept the eastern states in the decades that followed and the beloved resource was essentially destroyed. A key species in the ecosystem of its time, Castanea dentata left an undeniable mark on the entire continent of North America.
"The historical period began with European descriptions of the primeval chestnut forests during the Desoto Expedition in 1520. Finding the nuts of the 'wild' American chestnuts sweet, but rather small, the colonists soon began importing larger-fruited chestnuts from Europe and Eastern Asian. By the late 19th century, a flourishing chestnut industry had developed in the United States, based in part on imports from Europe (in the eastern US), Japan (in the West), and in part on domestically-grown chestnuts. The US crop was harvested, mostly from the native American trees found throughout the Appalachian forests, and to a much lesser extent from orchard-grown trees planted near the major urban markets of New York and Philadelphia.
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The chestnut blight disease was first observed in New York City in 1904 and the subsequent destruction of the American chestnut (by chestnut blight) ranks as one of the worst ecological disasters in the annals of forest pathology. Within 40 years of its discovery, Cryphonectria parasitica had eliminated C. dentata from an enormous range that extended from southeastern Canada into Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. There is no other example of a canopy-dominant tree being removed so quickly and completely from its ecological niche. The chestnut blight destroyed what was arguably among the most abundant, important, useful, and valuable of North American hardwood trees. The loss of C. dentata to the chestnut blight pandemic in the early 20th century effectively ended the experience of American chestnuts for most Americans...
The chestnut blight nearly extinguished the culture of (the) American chestnut and all its uses. The legacy of chestnut blight includes a rich folklore of song and oral tradition, but eyewitnesses to the pandemic are fewer and fewer every year as that demographic ages and passes away. There is an urgent effort underway to preserve these chestnut memories...the USA is also the 'melting pot' of chestnuts; immigrants from the world over have come to America with their chestnuts and it is within these communities that a tradition of chestnut culture persists." [1]
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[1] Edited by Avanzato, D. (2009). Following Chestnut Footprints: Cultivation and Culture, Folklore and History, Traditions and Uses (pgs.169-171). Published by ISHS (International Society of Horticultural Science.