like manna FROM GOD: THE AMERICAN CHESTNUT TRADE IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA

Environmental History, Jul 2004 by Lutts, Ralph H

Chestnut Trees grow very tall and thick, mostly, however, in mountainous regions and high land. Its wood is very lasting, and its fruit exceptionally sweet.

-William Byrd (1737)1

THE YEAR 2004 marks the centennial of the arrival of the chestnut blight and the onset of the greatest ecological disaster to strike the forests of North America in historical times. In less than fifty years the blight wiped out a dominant tree of the eastern forest, the American chestnut (Castanea dentata). The disease killed an estimated 3.5 billion trees, the equivalent of over 9 million acres of pure chestnut stand.2 The disappearance of the chestnut led to the collapse of wildlife populations that were dependent upon its nuts as a food source, including bear, squirrel, and turkey. The replacement of the chestnut by other tree species led to the restructuring of forest communities.

The arrival of the chestnut blight was followed by other exotic diseases and insect infestations. The beetle-borne Dutch elm disease destroyed one of the nation's great shade trees. Today, flowering dogwood is under attack by anthracnose fungus, hemlocks by woolly adelgid insects, and oaks and other trees by gypsy moth. Other species are under similar stress as the Columbian exchange continues to introduce new organisms to the continent and internal threats also arise.3 But the American chestnut blight has a special place in the history of American forests. Not only did it create a rapid and large-scale ecological disaster, it also created a social and economic disaster for mountain communities.

The loss of the American chestnut was a tragedy for poor mountain residents in the southern Appalachian region. The nuts were a vital source of food for their families, autumn forage for their animals, and a commodity for barter and sale. Many people relied upon the seasonal crop of nuts and the natural abundance that they represented. As one mountaineer put it, "chestnuts were like the manna that God sent to feed the Israelites." A mountain woman remarked, "A grove of chestnuts is a better provider than a man-easier to have around, too."4

A great deal is known about the biology of the blight and its ecological effects.5 However, the social and economic roles of the chestnut and the effects of the blight on the people who depended upon the tree have received relatively little study. (Indeed, one of the most detailed studies to date was conducted by high school students and published in one of the Foxfire books.6) The people who participated in the trade and experienced the economic and social effects of the blight are now elderly and memory of these matters is passing with them. Local records of rural commerce are disappearing as they are lost or discarded. This is unfortunate, because the story of the chestnut trade is an important part of the history of the people and forests of the southern Appalachian mountains.

What follows is an examination of the social and economic roles of the chestnuts in the southern Appalachians. This essay examines the nature and scale of the chestnut trade-including its growth and collapse in southwestern Virginia-and provides new insights into the chestnuts as a foraging commons, the poorly understood practice of managing forest stands of chestnuts as orchards, and the close of the commons in this region. Finally, it reveals the local diversity in the trade that can be discovered through small-scale and comparative studies.

The nuts were an abundant communal resource. Farmers' hogs and turkeys foraged the chestnut commons of mountain forests without regard to property lines. Farm families also foraged for nuts to eat themselves and, once the chestnut trade began, to sell or barter. With improvements in transportation this trade became particularly important to the poorest folks, because it was one of their few sources of cash and store credit. This trade was much larger than is generally realized. In some counties residents collected tens of thousands of pounds, sometimes well over 100,000 pounds for shipment to urban areas.

Exploitation of the chestnut commons boomed in the early twentieth century, only to go bust a few decades later. The boom-and-bust cycle is a well-known feature of resource commons: They are over-exploited, collapse, and (sometimes) recover. The bust of the chestnut trade had nothing to do with over-exploitation, however, nor was the closure of the commons associated with industrialization or class conflict. The tree was killed, the trade stopped, and the chestnut commons closed by a fungal disease.

Most accounts of the role of chestnuts in mountain culture and economy are quite general in nature and none use a comparative approach. As a result, they tell a story that implies a uniformity of experience and practice throughout the southern Appalachian region. This study, however, finds that the scale of the chestnut trade varied widely among neighboring counties in the Blue Ridge of southwestern Virginia, depending upon local transportation systems and economic circumstances. It demonstrates the importance of small-scale comparative studies to an understanding of the trade and the role chestnuts played in mountain culture and economy.7