Bough broke for chestnut

By David Maurer

Published: July 27, 2008

It was a ritual of autumn that played out from Maine into the deep South.

The annual gathering of chestnuts occurred in city parks, on family farms and throughout mountainous woodlands. Wherever the majestic American chestnut trees grew, enthusiastic gatherers could be found “chestnutting.”

Agile boys would often gleefully clamber up into the trees and shake the nuts from the boughs. Because the trees often grew to be more than 100 feet high, sometimes the lowest branches were out of reach, making them difficult to climb.

Such was the case with a beautiful chestnut tree that grew in the yard of the farm where Dr. John L. Guerrant grew up. The farm was in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Franklin County, which was once prime real estate for the tree.

Stick tossing

“It was a big tree with a big trunk to it,” the 97-year-old retired physician remembered. “It had limbs beginning, oh, 20 feet from the ground.

“It spread out over a nice area. It was a beautiful tree. In the fall of the year my father could take a stick of wood and throw it up into the tree and make the chestnuts fall.

“We children would then pick them up. None of us could throw a stick that far up in the tree, but my father could do it very well.”

Tragically, Guerrant’s generation was one of the last to enjoy this annual rite of fall. What became known as the chestnut blight arrived in the United States around 1900.

It’s believed the deadly fungus got here on infected Chinese chestnut trees that were delivered to a Long Island, N.Y., nursery. Carried on wind and water it took the disease just a few years to begin laying waste to the trees.

Borrowed time

Although the blight was detected in Virginia as early as 1911, its full impact wasn’t felt until a decade or so later. This gave the future University of Virginia doctor time to enjoy one of the lucrative benefits of the generous tree.

“When I was a boy, I had two friends and during recess at school we’d go out among the chestnut trees and pick up the chestnuts,” said Guerrant, who received his medical degree from UVa in 1937 and now lives just east of Charlottesville.

“We’d put the chestnuts in our caps, and after school we’d take them to the local country store. The storekeeper would weigh our caps on the scale, and then dump the nuts into a barrel.

“He’d then give us a few cents, which we used to buy candy and other things young boys enjoy.”

Many Virginia farmers

depended on the annual chestnut crop to provide them with money to pay their taxes and buy the necessities to get them through the coming winter. When the trees started dying en masse and turned into stark, leafless skeletons, the financial and emotional impact of their loss was immense.

“We had a very large farm and there was an enormous number of large, robust chestnut trees on it,” Guerrant said. “It was a real financial catastrophe for my father when they all started dying.

“When it became apparent that all the chestnut trees had died, my father sent his farmhands into the woods to cut them down. There were no motorized saws at the time, so they used axes and cross-cut saws.

“There was a sawmill on the farm powered by a waterwheel. The men would load the logs onto a wagon pulled by mules, and take them to the mill where they were cut into boards.”

Guerrant remembers that year had been particularly trying. They were in the midst of the Great Depression, and a late frost had wiped out the apple crop, which was the main source of income on the farm.

As it turned out, even in death, the chestnut trees continued to give.

“I spent that summer driving truck loads of wormy chestnut boards to a furniture factory in Rocky Mount,” Guerrant said. “They used the chestnut as a base wood, and then glued thin pieces of expensive wood onto it.

“That wormy chestnut permitted my father to keep his farmhands working for months, even though the late frost had killedall our apples.”

By the middle of the 20th century, the blight had destroyed an estimated 3.5 billion chestnut trees. No longer would the Virginia mountains turn white in the spring when the beloved trees bloomed.

But because the wood is as durable as it is beautiful, it remains even to this day as a reminder of what had been.

“I went to a restaurant near Portsmouth some years ago,” Guerrant said.

“It was paneled with wormy chestnut.

“I cornered the owner and started talking to him about chestnut trees and asked him where he got that wood. He told me some things that made me believe it was wood from my father’s farm.”

Nearly as soon as the blight was identified, efforts were started to save the tree from extinction. The slow, difficult and tedious work has advanced to the point where many foresters and scientists now believe the return of the American chestnut tree is imminent.

Perhaps in the not too distant future a new generation of children will experience the joy of gathering and eating newly fallen chestnuts. It’s a dream many devoted people are working hard to achieve.

To learn more about the American chestnut tree and the effort to save it visit the American Chestnut Foundation’s Web site at http://www.acf.org. To contact the Virginia chapter of the foundation, e-mail vachestnut@ grthompson.com or call (540) 364-0364.