The Recovery of the American Chestnut

by Keith Ray
Director of Conservation
Southeastern Trust for Parks and Land

Back in the early 2000’s, when I was a young biology student at Reinhardt University, I had the pleasure to sit in front of a very charismatic speaker that came to talk to our class one day. What he came to talk about wasn’t important before class started, it just meant that we didn’t have to listen to another lecture from our professor. I can’t tell you who he was, but I was struck with what he told us that day. We were missing some trees in the environment right outside the building that used to be there. Huge trees, mythical in their size and impact, and that not a single person in that room had seen one alive. He was of course talking about the stately American Chestnut. One of the most dominant trees in the eastern US at the turn of the last century, they were functionally extinct by 1950, the victim of the chestnut blight, a pathogenic fungus introduced from China in 1904. As a young biologist and budding conservationist, I was stuck by how a group of trees that made up around 25% off all the trees in the eastern forests were gone in less than 50 years. Seems unimaginable when we think about how massive they were, how much they affected ecosystems that they lived in and created, and how they were gone in one human generation.

Fast forward to 2017, when I began to work as a volunteer with the Georgia Chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation to help establish a seed orchard in Waleska, GA, in a partnership between Reinhardt University and Dr. Austin Flint where the seeds will hopefully be used to reestablish hybrid American Chestnuts in the wild. I have learned so much about how the blight affects American Chestnuts, where and how some survived, and what is being done to save them. The interesting thing to me was that American Chestnuts are everywhere. They are sprouts from roots from old chestnuts that were killed from the blight, but they are short lived, rarely making it to 5 years old. Since I started as Director of Conservation of the Southeastern Trust, I have begun to tour the STPAL properties, and I’ve kept my eyes open from young chestnut sprouts so that I can learn where they once were and where we can collaborate in future reestablishment efforts on our properties. So far, they can be found at many of our mountain properties in Georgia and North Carolina and some are quite impressive and are much older than 5.

I am hopeful that our conservation efforts now will help set the stage for the recovery of the American Chestnut in the near future.