Who among you eastern US residents can recall grandpa’s stories about the Golden Years of the Great American Chestnut Tree.

Only his generation (Born: 1870s to 1940s) are among those who could have witnessed the estimated 4 Billion American chestnut trees that spanned across 300,000 square miles in the eastern United States. For their “keep” they fed wild Bears, Deer, Turkeys, Blue Jays and numerous other critters for 10 million years before modern man arrived approximately 25,000 years ago in the current day eastern United States. They too depended heavily upon the annual nut crop which ranged from feeding their livestock to feeding themselves with roasted chestnuts and various products resulting from ground Chestnut Flower which was used for cakes and several other sweet delicacies.

Hundreds of years later, the American Chestnut tree, by then also known as the eastern “Redwood” played a major role in providing logs and lumber for the construction of homes and businesses of the Eastern US.  During the milling process it was soon learned that every part of the tree, particularly the tree’s bark held a high content of rich, nearly clear tannic acid or “tannin” which created a premium leather product. This additional attribute earned the tree a new title: “the perfect tree”.

Alas! By the early 1950 it’s been estimated that as much as 99% of all American Chestnut trees were stricken and killed by an air-born Asian fungus that became known as the “Chestnut Blight”. The infection is thought to have started in 1904 in a New York public Park with the planting of an imported tree. Within 60 years, The Great American Chestnut tree forest was very near the brink of extinction!

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