Lumber, shelter, delicious nuts—there was nothing the American chestnut couldn’t provide.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Millennium Images / Gallery Stock; Bettmann/Getty
December 24, 2023, 8 AM ET
Indeed, stories of the American chestnut span heartwarming landscapes and enchanting forests. A little more than a century ago, these woods brimmed with American chestnuts—stately Goliaths that could grow as high as 130 feet tall and more than 10 feet wide. Nicknamed “the redwoods of the East,” some 4 billion American chestnuts dotted the United States’ eastern flank, stretching from the misty coasts of Maine down into the thick humidity of Appalachia.
The American chestnut was, as the writer Susan Freinkel noted elegantly in her 2009 book, “a perfect tree.” Its wood housed birds and mammals; its leaves infused the soil with minerals; its flowers sated honeybees that would ferry pollen out to nearby trees. In the autumn, its branches would bend under the weight of nubby grape-size nuts. When they dropped to the forest floor, they’d nourish raccoons, bears, turkey, and deer. For generations, Indigenous people feasted on the nuts, split the wood for kindling, and laced the leaves into their medicine. Later on, European settlers, too, introduced the nuts into their recipes and orchards, and eventually learned to incorporate the trees’ sturdy, rot-resistant wood into fence posts, telephone poles, and railroad ties. The chestnut became a tree that could shepherd people “from cradle to grave,” Patrícia Fernandes, the assistant director of the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, told me. It made up the cribs that newborn babies were placed into; it shored up the coffins that bodies were laid to rest inside.
But in modern American life, chestnuts are almost entirely absent. In the first half of the 20th century, a fungal disease called blight, inadvertently imported from Asia on trade ships, wiped out nearly all of the trees. Chestnut wood disappeared from newly made furniture; people forgot the taste of the fruits, save those imported from abroad. Subsistence farmers lost their entire livelihoods. After reigning over forests for millennia, the species went functionally extinct—a loss that a biologist once declared “the greatest ecological disaster in North America since the Ice Age.”
Most of the people who lived during the American chestnut heyday are gone. But the nutty world they lived in could yet make a comeback. For decades, a small cohort of volunteers and scientists—many of them the children and grandchildren of chestnut growers long gone—has been working to return the American chestnut to its native range. It’s a quest that’s partly about salvaging biodiversity and partly a mea culpa. “The hope is that you can fix something that we as humans broke,” says Kendra Collins, the American Chestnut Foundation’s director of regional programs in New England. If restoration is successful, it’ll bring back a tree unlike any other—versatile,
