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

Environmental History, Jul 2004 by Lutts, Ralph H

In southwestern Virginia and elsewhere, when people brought nuts to a store, they had three options for compensation. They could receive cash, exchange them for merchandise, or have the value of the nuts credited to their store account to pay off past or future debts. If they received cash, they were usually paid in cardboard or metal tokens called "due bills," or the amount received was written on a slip of paper called "scrip." These were good only for exchange at the issuing store, so customers actually received store credit, rather than cash. If a store owner has a good reputation for trustworthiness, the store's due bills and scrip might be exchanged in transactions among local people before they were eventually cashed in at the store. In effect, each country store minted its own money.27

Store owners kept two different kinds of records. The first, called the day book, was a detailed running record of transactions with customers. This was recorded at the time of the exchange. Some of this information was later transferred to a customer accounts book. This book did not record even-exchange or paid-in-full transactions. The accounts book recorded debt and credit, with a page for each customer. The left column of the page was a record of the customer's debt, of merchandise taken without immediate or full payment. The right column was a record of credit, of payments in cash or barter made against the debt. Thus, the day books provide a full record of the chestnut trade at a country store. This is not true of the customer accounts books, but they provide a clearer understanding of who engaged in the trade and their economic standing. Those who paid off their debts in cash, those who were relatively well off economically, rarely offered nuts against their accounts. In the autumn, those who offered barter against their debt often offered chestnuts. (They sometimes also offered small quantities of chinquapin nuts and, rarely, walnuts.) Some customers, presumably the poorest, paid their debt entirely in chestnuts when they were in season.

Once merchants received chestnuts, they had to ship them to a market outside their region. They bagged the nuts in cloth sacks and hauled them to the railroad station. This was not an easy trip. Although roads in the region had improved by the early twentieth century, they were still dirt roads and travel often was difficult. (Most Blue Ridge communities did not see a paved road until the arrival of the Blue Ridge Parkway in the 1930s, after the chestnut trade had died.) James D. Hopkins, a Patrick County store owner, would haul two thousand pounds of nuts at a time to the railroad station in his horse-drawn wagon. Alternatively, if a supplier brought goods to a store, the merchant might ship the nuts back to town in the supplier's otherwise empty wagon. People recalled wagon loads of nuts traveling daily from the Patrick County Blue Ridge communities of Vesta and Meadows of Dan to the railroad station in Stuart, the county seat. It took two days to make the round trip by wagon to Stuart, a total distance of about thirty-five miles. Murphy Thompson hauled nuts, often two wagon loads at a time, from Floyd County to the railroad station in Franklin County's town of Ferrum. Nuts from other parts of Floyd County and from Carroll County, which also had no railroad, might have been hauled to Radford or Pulaski.28