Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 21, 1990 TAG: 9004210123
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LITHIA LENGTH: Medium
Forty years after a mysterious blight wiped out the king of Appalachian hardwoods, the trunks still haven't rotted, an eerie reminder of the durability that once made the chestnut the nation's tree-of-choice.
"It was an amazing tree," says the Botetourt County chestnut enthusiast, who hopes to bring the species back to life.
"This was the most important tree to the American economy," continues his partner in propagation, Ren Heard. "All the early fences, all the early houses, all chestnut. It was the straightest, strongest, most rot-resistant wood this country has ever known."
Appalachian farmers used the wood for everything from split-rail fences to furniture to dulcimers. They shipped the nuts off by the boxcar to sell in cities. Come winter, Heckler says, "old-timers would turn their pigs loose in the woods and they'd eat chestnuts for months."
Growing 100 feet tall, often living 600 years, the chestnut was the "redwood of the East Coast." Once one out of every four trees in the Appalachians was a chestnut; when the chestnuts bloomed in early summer, the hills were said to look as if they were covered with snow.
But now the chestnuts are almost all gone, victims of man's ignorance and carelessness. The blight was accidentally imported from the Orient before the advent of agricultural quarantine laws. First spotted in the Bronx Zoo in 1904, it spread down the East Coast.
Farmers tried everything they could to save the chestnut. "They cut a mile-wide path through Pennsylvania, trying to stop the spores from jumping," Heckler says.
By 1950, the species was virtually extinct.
In recent years, scientists have sought to rejuvenate the chestnut through genetic engineering.
The American Chestnut Foundation, organized in 1983 at West Virginia University, has sought to cross some of the isolated American chestnuts that have survived with their ungainly Chinese cousins. While the American chestnuts are straight and tall, the Chinese chestnuts are short and squat - and resistant to the blight.
The foundation runs a research farm near Abingdon where the first generation of crossed trees has now produced seed - and the foundation is organizing state chapters to distribute the nuts.
That's where Heckler and Heard come in.
When Heckler, a longtime back-to-the-lander, heard about the American Chestnut Foundation, he offered to set up a Virginia chapter.
Heard, master builder for the proposed Explore living-history state park outside Vinton, became interested in chestnuts because of the role they played in the pioneer era Explore hopes to re-create.
"I've been working a year to get hold of seedlings," Heard says. Heckler had access to them; he just needed a place to grow them that met the foundation's requirement that the land not be sold. Explore - as state property - qualified.
So last week, Heard dug up a patch of earth and planted 29 sprouting nuts.
For Explore project director Bern Ewert, the chestnut experiment highlights part of the story he hopes the state park re-creating Virginia's role in opening the American West will tell - the environmental story.
"We want to take it out of the books and bring it to life in a way that's fun to learn about," Ewert says.
For now, though, all that remains in the future and somewhat in doubt - just like the prospects of resurrecting the American chestnut.
\ Wanted: rare chestnut tree
Know where there's a surviving American chestnut tree?
The American Chestnut Foundation wants to know so it can preserve the tree's genetic material for breeding purposes.
For more information on the foundation's Virginia chapter, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Henry Heckler, Route 3, Box 177, Buchanan 24066.
by CNB