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

Environmental History, Jul 2004 by Lutts, Ralph H

This article focuses on the period of 1900-1930 and the five southwestern Virginia Blue Ridge counties that extend southwest of Roanoke: Franklin, Floyd, Patrick, Carroll, and Grayson. Floyd, Carroll, and Grayson counties are part of the core region of Appalachia as defined by John Alexander Williams.8 The Blue Ridge portions of Franklin and Patrick counties are topographically and culturally similar to the other three. During that time, the economy of this region was based largely on agriculture, although Grayson County also was involved in a timber boom at the beginning of the century.

Information about the chestnut trade in these counties is limited largely to oral histories and memoirs. Quantitative data are difficult to find, but some country store records from this period help to confirm informants' memories and add greater depth to our understanding. Published material addressing the trade in the larger southern Appalachian region also help to flesh out this story. If this account sometimes offers more questions than answers, it nevertheless helps to bring new understanding to this important, largely overlooked thread in American environmental history.

THE AMERICAN CHESTNUT

AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, the American chestnut ranged from southern Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont southward along the Appalachian Mountains to Georgia and Alabama. Westward, its range extended to Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the northeastern corner of Mississippi. In the southern Appalachians the tree often reached 120 feet in height and 7 feet in diameter and sometimes exceeded this size. Common at altitudes above 2,000 feet, chestnuts grew best in moist hollows above 3,000 feet.9 Chestnuts commonly comprised up to 20 percent or more of the forest trees and locally they could account for 50 percent or more. A member of the beech family, the chestnut tree usually bore dark brown nuts enclosed two or three together within a two- to three-inch spherical burr protected by extraordinarily sharp spines. No one collected chestnuts barefoot.

It is difficult to imagine the oak-chestnut forests before the ravages of the chestnut blight. One person described how the "light, cream-colored blossoms, and a big tree that grew up a hundred feet high would have a spread at the top of it a hundred feet wide, maybe. You could see them sticking up out of the woods, and it was just like big, potted flowers standing up all over the mountain. It was a sight to see." The nature writer Donald Peattie described the trees viewed from a mountaintop in the Great Smoky Mountains, "the great forest below waving with creamy white chestnut blossoms in the crowns of the ancient trees, so that it looks like a sea of white combers plowing across its surface." Another writer remembered the tree's "great domes of yellow, arched up above the lane, and lying like great piles of pollen here and there over the wooded hills. Its perfume is everywhere, not honey-sweet like the locust's, but with a savingtangof acrid, of a kind, but of a differing savor, with that of buckwheat. Is there ... another woodstree with bloom so beautiful?"10