'Standing Skeletons': How A 20th-Century Blight Wiped Out 4 Billion American Chestnut Trees
Though it once numbered in the billions, the American chestnut tree was effectively wiped out due to an early 20th-century blight.
From Florida’s panhandle to coastal Maine and across the Appalachians to the Mississippi River, the proud and mighty American chestnut tree once blanketed the eastern U.S.
As many as four billion chestnut trees created a massive canopy — and provided a home and food source for a complex forest ecosystem. Entire industries depended on the sprawling hardwood forest.
Then, in 1904, a biologist noticed a strange growth on a chestnut tree at the Bronx Zoo.
Within decades, nearly every American chestnut tree in the country died from the blight. But there’s still hope that this tree species could be revived.
The Proud History Of The American Chestnut Tree
For centuries, American chestnut trees provided shade, food, and building material. Calorie-dense and packed with antioxidants, chestnuts were a healthy food source and medicine for Indigenous people, and European settlers found that the sturdy, rot-resistant wood was good material for building furniture, fences, and even log cabins. According to the American Chestnut Foundation, some telephone poles and railroad ties made from American chestnut trees are even still in use today.
Indeed, the chestnut trees played an important role in every part of life. The Cherokees used its leaves to treat heart pain and heal sores; cattle and pigs grazed on chestnuts to fatten them up before the slaughter; and countless people were buried in chestnut wood caskets. Hawks roosted in the tree’s branches, and wild turkeys sheltered near the roots.
The trees were so abundant — at one point, there were four billion across the country — that their chestnuts were easily gathered. According to the Sierra Club, the chestnuts fell “in carpets half a foot thick” which people could gather by the handful. One railway station in West Virginia purportedly once shipped 155,000 pounds of chestnuts after an abundant season.
But a 20th-century blight would nearly wipe out the trees completely.
‘A Gloomy View’: Inside The Spread Of The American Chestnut Tree Blight
In 1904, orange patches appeared on the American chestnut trees at the Bronx Zoo in New York. Biologist William A. Murrill was called in to investigate, and found that a fungus had attacked the trees.
“My observations in the Bronx this season have led me to take a gloomy view regarding the immediate future of the chestnut here,” Murrill wrote a year later. He warned that the blight could eventually kill every American chestnut tree. But the warning came too late — the blight had already spread to New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C.
What was the chestnut tree blight? Caused by the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica, the disease penetrates the trunk and grows under the tree’s bark. After orange cankers appear on the trunk and branches, the tree’s towering limbs would die. Next the trunk would succumb.
Though the tree’s roots remained healthy, the tree itself was dead.
And the blight spread shockingly fast. The disease-carrying fungus traveled by wind, and spread 50 miles a year. Though Boy Scouts were tasked with tramping through the woods and destroying infected trees to stop the spread, the blight seemed unstoppable. Before long, scores of the beloved trees were dying across the country.
But where did the devastating disease come from?
Where Did The American Chestnut Tree Blight Come From?
As the American chestnut tree blight spread across the United States, scientists puzzled over the source of the disease.
“The origin of the disease and the center of its distribution are still entirely unknown,” Murrill wrote in 1908, “while the area of its distribution is known very imperfectly as yet and can be determined accurately only by careful field explorations conducted by competent persons.”
So what caused the blight? Ultimately, scientists determined that the blight had originated from imported Japanese chestnut trees, which had arrived in the United States in 1876. Though the Japanese trees carried the blight, they were resistant to its scourge. However, the American chestnut tree had no resistance to the disease.
In their attempt to stop the blight, Americans made it worse. According to the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, Americans planted 25 Japanese chestnut trees in a healthy Pennsylvanian forest, hoping that this would stop the blight from spreading. Instead, it likely made things worse.
Within 50 years, all four billion American chestnut trees had been infected. Instead of roasting homegrown chestnuts every holiday season, Americans had to import chestnuts from Europe.
“I was born in 1930, and I only remember dead trees,” biology professor Blair Carbaugh remarked to the Sierra Club. “There were dead stems in the woods here and there. My father and grandfather told me they’d been chestnuts and these were their standing skeletons.”
But some still hope that the mighty American chestnut tree could be saved.
The Revival Of The American Chestnut Tree
The blight may have effectively killed every American chestnut tree, but it didn’t make the tree extinct. That’s because the disease does not harm the tree’s underground roots — small sprouts remain.
According to the Sierra Club, there are still about 430 million wild American chestnuts in the country. But none can grow above ground for long without eventually becoming infected.
The American Chestnut Tree Foundation wants to change this. Through a combination of scientific research and breeding, the organization is working to develop a “blight-resistant and Phytophthora-resistant American chestnut tree.” But even if their reforestation project works, it will take generations to regrow a forest of four billion.
“We call this a century project,” SUNY biology professor William Powell told the Sierra Club. “To get it to look even somewhat like it did before the blight is going to take centuries. It’s for the next generation — it's planting a tree you’ll never enjoy the shade of.”
After learning about the American chestnut tree, the once prevalent species that was decimated by a 20th-century blight, discover the fascinating story of the Methuselah tree, the oldest tree in the world. Then check out the most amazing trees on Earth.
