Mountain people called chestnut "the best wood God ever growed." They ate its fruit, raw, boiled, and baked. As furniture chestnut could be rubbed to shine like a coon's eye in a full moon. Their straight grained trunks became sturdy cabins and long lived rail fences. Shingles rived of chestnut promised three generations of wear.
Before the turn of the century, the eastern half of the United States was dominated by the American chestnut. Because it could grow rapidly and attain huge sizes. The wood was used wherever strength and rot-resistance was needed.
Flowering began in as little as five years, and as trees matured, crops become frequent and copious. The sale of the brown nuts brought many things hillside land that wouldn't produce
In the Appalachian Mountains, one in every four hardwoods was an American chestnut. Mature trees often grew straight and branch-free for 50 feet and could grow up to 100 feet tall with a trunk diameter of 14 feet at a few feet above ground level. For three centuries many barns and homes near the Appalachian Mountains were made from American chestnut.
Hogs and cattle were often fattened for market by allowing them to forage in chestnut-dominated forests. Chestnut ripening coincided with the Thanksgiving-Christmas holiday season, and eventually train cars filled to overflowing with chestnuts rolling into major cities to be sold fresh or roasted. The American chestnut was truly our heritage tree.
In 1908, mountain people noticed chestnut trees dying in their forests. A blight was destroying the inner bark of the trees. Nothing could be found to stop the disease from spreading. The blight ate on, insatiably, up one green mountainside and down the other. The nearly four-billion-strong American chestnut population in North America was devastated within 40 years.
Chestnut heartwood is legendary for its rot resistance. Logging of standing dead trees and then of the fallen logs took place for decades after the chestnut trees were killed.
