Where Did All the American Chestnuts Go?

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” is not just the iconic first line from the beloved holiday classic “The Christmas Song.” It’s meant to evoke a nostalgic image of the holiday tradition that was common in America. Unfortunately, most of us never had a chance to make that Christmas memory because of a blight that caused the near-extinction of American chestnut trees some 85 years ago.

Chestnuts were synonymous with Christmas in the US long before Nat King Cole’s holiday song became a hit. They were one of the most popular ingredients in American dishes throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and for good reason: the Eastern seaboard was covered in chestnut trees.

American chestnut trees were a dominant species throughout most of the east and the Appalachian Mountain range. Their trunks could grow to be 10 feet wide and stretch upward of 105 feet into the canopy; limbs spanned an equally wide footprint. The trees could live for up to 600 years and covered an estimated 300,000 square miles of land from Maine to Mississippi.

“This was the tree of early America,” writes author Susan Freinkel in her book, “American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree.” Carpenters prized their strong, straight-grained, and decay-resistant wood. Farmers praised their ability to feed and produce world-class livestock. Sportsmen revered them as a primary food source for wildlife. Gourmands celebrated their dry fruit as the world’s tastiest variety of chestnut. It came to be known as “a perfect tree and had a value and versatility unmatched by any other hardwood,” explains Freinkel.

Then around 1904, an invasive blight attacked America’s great chestnut trees. It was accidentally introduced in New York by way of imported Japanese varieties and spread like wildfire through eastern forests. By 1941, the blight had eradicated 3.5 BILLION American chestnut trees and rendered the species functionally extinct. According to experts, it’s the most extreme recorded change in natural plant population caused by an introduced organism in history.

According to, Jen Santoro, PhD, assistant teaching professor at Villanova University, the consequences were felt strongly throughout the country, but especially in Appalachia, whose inhabitants relied heavily on the timber and even the nuts. Farmers used them to bulk up their hogs before sale, but lost that free source of animal feed once the species population declined. “There is a link between the loss of the American chestnut and the decline of the Appalachian economy that persists to this day,” Santoro says.

Since at least the 1950s, groups have sprung up with the aim of bringing back the America chestnut tree. A loose collective studied the blight fungus, scoured for surviving trees, and gleaned samples from other resistant chestnut varieties. The American Chestnut Foundation (ACF) officially formed in 1983, and now serves as a central force for disseminating information and furthering research aimed at restoring American chestnuts to the wild.

The ACF has been actively working to rewild the American chestnut with new generations that are immune to the blight. Those years of effort are finally paying off – the painstakingly slow work has now produced 700 large-scale plantings across 2,000 acres of public and private land in the eastern U.S. to date.

The majority are managed, monoculture research or nursery orchards aimed at producing increasingly blight-resistant trees. However, some are actually out in the wild where researchers are testing their meddle against other native trees. A Meadowview, Virginia, research center spearheads the effort, and more than a dozen experimental, large-plot plantings on state public lands have not only survived but reached maturity.

Lesesne State Forest in Nelson County, Virginia, for instance, holds about thirty acres of natural, second-growth woods anchored by seventy-foot-tall American chestnut trees that are more than sixty years old—and produce delicious wild nuts that few living people beyond foresters and researchers have ever tasted, until now.

“We don’t go out of our way to advertise this fact,” says forester John Scrivani  “but the public can now hike in and walk through natural groves of healthy American chestnut trees and forage for nuts for the first time in nearly a century.”

Large stands of publicly accessible American chestnut forests are now found in more than a dozen locations spread across the Virginia mountains. Other smaller experimental plots exist in Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maine, but the largest and oldest sit within ten miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway at Lesesne and Matthews State Forest in Galax, Virginia. Sky Meadows State Park and the Mountain Lake Wilderness, both in Virginia, also hold destination-worthy groves. 

You can learn more about the American chestnut tree and how you can take part in the multi-generational effort to restore it to US forests at the American Chestnut Foundation HERE.  And hopefully, 100 years from now, Americans will once again be basking in roasted chestnut memories!