Journal · Wild foods

American chestnut restoration and the giants the blight killed

A fungus from New York reached the Smokies in about 1925 and killed the tree that fed these mountains. Here is what the record measured, who did the cutting, and where restoration stands.

Highland Willow · Boone, North Carolina · 8 November 2026

Ask anyone who grew up in these mountains about the American chestnut and you will hear some version of the same story. The trees were so big that a family could live in a hollow one. One tree in four was a chestnut. Then the blight came, the Forest Service cut them all down, and the mountains were never the same.

Parts of that story are true, and some of the truth is stranger than the story. Other parts did not survive when we went back to the measurements, the survey plots and the records of the men who did the cutting. This article sets out what the record actually shows, and where American chestnut restoration stands in November 2026.

A tree of the southern Blue Ridge

The chestnut's range was large, about 309,000 square miles, roughly a third of the eastern forest. But the famous line that one eastern tree in four was a chestnut does not hold up across that range. Surveyors' witness trees, recorded as land was first settled, put chestnut at 3% across more than 700 northeastern townships, and at 5% to 12% across most of West Virginia and western Virginia. The "25% or more" figure is repeated in print, for example in a 1988 American Scientist article, but it is a claim, not a survey result (Faison and Foster 2014).

In the southern mountains it was a different forest. On the northeast Georgia Blue Ridge escarpment chestnut was 20% of the witness trees and the commonest species (Faison and Foster). At Coweeta, in the Nantahala Mountains of North Carolina, survey plots laid out in 1934 found chestnut in 98% of plots, making up 22% of the stems and 36% of the basal area, the total cross-section of the trunks (Elliott and Swank 2008). That gap between stems and trunk area is the point. The chestnuts were the big trees, which is why foresters remembered them as the whole forest. On the north slopes of what is now the Joyce Kilmer forest, chestnut was over 83% of the canopy trees, and on Salt Pond Mountain in Virginia, 56% to 85% (Braun 1950, via Faison and Foster).

What made it matter was how reliable it was. Chestnut flowered in late June, after the late frosts that can wipe out a whole year's acorns (TACF and Penn State). Wild turkeys in feeding trials chose American chestnuts over Chinese ones (Minser et al. 1995). In 1978 an entomologist listed seven moths reported to feed on nothing but American chestnut (Opler 1978). When the chestnuts died in the Smokies, chestnut oak, northern red oak and red maple made up 46% of the trees that replaced them (University of Tennessee dissertation).

Mountain money

Chestnuts became cash when the railroad came. Before rail, a nut crop could not leave the mountains; after it, chestnuts were bought by the pound at country stores and shipped to Richmond, Philadelphia and New York. The 1910 agricultural census recorded nearly 160,000 pounds from Patrick County, Virginia, alone, and more than 360,000 pounds from Patrick and four neighbouring counties, nearly half of Virginia's nut harvest. People who remembered selling them recalled getting five to ten cents a pound at the start of the season, falling to two or three within weeks. One man, interviewed in 1981, called the chestnut crop "the biggest single income of the whole top of the mountain" (Freinkel 2005, drawing on Ralph Lutts).

The nuts also fed hogs that ran loose on unfenced woodland and came home fat in the fall. In North Carolina that open range was being closed by law before the blight arrived, through a 1901 law that eased fencing and a 1917 statute that "soon ended the practice of free range in most of the state" (NCpedia).

The wood was worth more than the nuts. By 1909, by the forestry figures of the day, chestnut was about a quarter of the hardwood lumber cut in the southern Appalachians, roughly 600 million board feet a year (Freinkel 2005). The bark and wood were also rich in tannin for leather. Champion Fibre at Canton, North Carolina, started production in January 1908, pulping the chestnut chips after the tannin was boiled out of them, and gave up its tannin plant in 1951 as the supply of chestnut wood, falling since the blight, dried up (Forest History Society).

The tree lives on in memory and in the kitchen. Emma Walkingstick, born in 1920, remembered her mother making Cherokee chestnut bread from the family's own trees (University of North Carolina exhibit). On the Qualla Boundary today, the cook Paul Dillman makes it with Chinese chestnuts (Mountain Xpress). You will also hear that families paid their taxes and bought the children's school shoes with chestnut money. That may well be true, but we could not find a firsthand source for it.

A fungus from New York

The blight was first noticed by Hermann Merkel at the Bronx Zoo in 1904, and was almost certainly there more than a year before he saw it. By 1913 the case that it came from Asia rested on two things: it had spread outward in rings from New York City, and the plant explorer Frank Meyer had found the same fungus on resistant chestnuts in northeastern China (Pennsylvania Chestnut Tree Blight Commission, 1914).

The fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, gets in through wounds in the bark and spreads in cankers that girdle the trunk. It often kills a mature tree in two or three years. The roots do not die, which is why chestnuts still sprout from old stumps across these mountains (Faison and Foster 2014). One finding from 1914 matters for what came next: the fungus grows even more readily on dead wood than on living trees, so logs left with their bark on, and stumps, kept on spreading it (Pennsylvania commission).

It reached North Carolina by 1923, Coweeta by 1926 and the Great Smokies in about 1925 or 1926, dated from the growth spurt in neighbouring trees when the chestnuts beside them died (Faison and Foster; University of Tennessee). The Bronx to Gatlinburg is about 630 miles, so the front moved at roughly 30 miles a year, by our arithmetic. When the national park was dedicated in 1940, about 85% of its chestnuts had been killed or affected by the blight, and ten years later more than 95% were affected (National Park Service). Across the whole range, Faison and Foster write, the destruction was complete by the early 1940s (Faison and Foster).

Did the Forest Service cut them all down?

This is the part of the story we most wanted to get right, because it is the part people feel most strongly about. What we found is that the popular version runs four different things together. Each one is real. Together, as one picture of rangers felling a living forest, they are not what the record shows.

Logging came first. Loggers were felling living chestnut across the southern mountains long before the blight. By our reading of the figures it ran from about 1880 to 1925. The Coweeta basin was logged from 1919 to 1923, three years before the blight reached it (Elliott and Swank 2008). The most famous photograph of giant chestnuts, taken by Sidney Streator at Poplar Cove in 1909, was made to sell timber: it advertised a newly acquired timber holding to investors, and in 1910 a cruise of that tract in Graham County counted more than 40 million board feet of chestnut, 30% of its standing timber (Davis 2021). Poplar Cove itself was never logged and became the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest. Champion's tannin plant was buying chestnut wood from 1908. Across the southern mountains, any trees with natural resistance that stood in logged coves were cut along with the rest, by timber companies, for lumber.

Healthy trees were cut to stop the blight, by a state, at some spots. The documented campaign to fell healthy chestnuts to stop the disease was Pennsylvania's. The state created a Chestnut Tree Blight Commission on 14 June 1911, with $275,000. Its staff cut infected trees and, at some spots, healthy ones around them: its records describe 17 healthy trees cut within 30 yards of one infection, and one infected spot of 822 trees cleared for $70.50. The work was done spot by spot, around each new infection. The law required that healthy trees ordered cut be paid for, so scouts at first inspected closely to avoid cutting them. By 1914 the commission recommended cutting "all of the chestnut trees inside of the area regardless of whether or not they show visible signs of the blight", to save the cost of inspection. All fieldwork stopped on 25 July 1913. The commission said it had held the disease back five years in the western half of the state. The blight then swept the state anyway (Pennsylvania commission final report, 1914).

The federal government had a hand in it. The commission used "the cutting out methods advocated by the U. S. Department of Agriculture". Those methods came from the Department's plant pathologists, in the same department as the Forest Service, and the Forest Service itself co-operated with Pennsylvania on experiments with blighted wood. A New York Botanical Garden scientist had advised in 1908 that owners should "cut and use all trees, both old and young, that stand within half a mile of diseased trees", though he later partly backed off. By 1914, Virginia and West Virginia had taken up the eradication work themselves (Pennsylvania commission). We did not find their records.

Most later cutting in the south was salvage. Once the blight reached the southern mountains in the mid-1920s, most of the cutting there was of trees it had already killed. In Macon County, North Carolina, home of the Nantahala National Forest, "the salvage of dead chestnut stumpage" was the main forest work in 1936 (Forest Service regional history), and Champion's tannin plant ran on chestnut until 1951.

What we did not find was any source describing a Forest Service campaign to fell living chestnuts across a mountain. That is not proof it never happened. Several federal bulletins from 1911 to 1930 were written for owners about the blight, and we could not read their texts. You will also see it written that, in the 1920s, the Department of Agriculture urged owners to cut healthy chestnuts and sell the timber before the blight got to them. We could not confirm that from the original source. Cutting healthy trees for their wood before the blight arrives is a different policy from cutting them to stop it, and the end of one does not tell us the end of the other.

The deepest version of the story says the cutting removed the resistant trees and doomed any natural recovery. No study has measured that. Two things we can say point in different directions. Cut stumps left with their bark on fed the fungus. But cut chestnuts sprouted back from the stump, so, on our reading, the lines of many cut trees probably lived on as understorey sprouts. And by 1957, the Forest Service was doing the opposite of cutting: it asked readers of Outdoor Life to report large surviving chestnuts, and got nearly 700 replies (Diller 1957).

How big were they, really?

You will see chestnuts described as eleven feet across. The first question to ask of any big-tree number is whether it is around the trunk or across it, because the two differ by a factor of pi. A tree eleven feet around is about three and a half feet across, a big chestnut but an ordinary one. A tree eleven feet across would be about 34.6 feet around, and no measured chestnut comes close.

Source: Davis 2021, Forest History Today.

The Porters Flat tree was named the first national champion chestnut in November 1942, a listing that left out that its crown was dead or dying. The forest historian Donald Davis sums up the record this way: trees of seven to nine feet across turn up again and again, but "very few" reached ten. The only "eleven feet in diameter" we found is his guess at what the flared Porters Flat trunk might have measured at ground level, if anyone had measured it there. Davis and others suggest the Francis Cove figure was taken at the base of the stump, on a double trunk, or was a circumference read as a diameter. A 2018 study argues that chestnut sizes grew in the retelling, partly because circumference was read as diameter and partly because the biggest trees came to be told as typical ones (Roanoke College). Even so, these were giants. The largest of Streator's trees still lay 110 feet along the forest floor in 2015 (Davis 2021).

How old were they?

You will also read that the old chestnuts were 300 or 400 years old or more. We did not find a single chestnut with a ring count that high. The firmest count from the southern mountains is a tree 53 inches across at Joyce Kilmer that was 210 years old when the blight killed it. In Concord in 1852, Thoreau counted 141 rings on a chestnut stump eight feet five inches across (Davis 2021).

The oldest dated chestnut wood in the Smokies comes from logs of blight-killed trees, crossdated into a record that runs from 1641 to 1930 (Rochner et al. 2017). That is a record built from many trees, though, and it does not show that any one of them lived 289 years. Older figures, such as 360 years or 400 to 600, come from applying a growth rate to a size, sometimes a size no one measured.

The honest answer is that nobody knows how long an American chestnut lives. The blight killed the old trees before old age could.

Is the American chestnut extinct?

Not quite, but the old forest is gone. Forest survey plots measured from 2002 to 2012 put the wild population at an estimated 431 million stems, about 84% of them sprouts less than an inch across that the blight kills back before they can flower (Dalgleish et al. 2016). No survivor approaches the old Smokies giants. In the south there is a second killer as well, a root rot that The American Chestnut Foundation says is most common in the southern part of the range (TACF annual report 2024 to 2025).

American chestnut restoration in 2026

There are three roads back, and they have come apart in the last few years.

Wild survivors alone are not enough. In 2025 The American Chestnut Foundation tested ten families bred from large surviving American chestnuts. On its resistance scale, where 0 is an ordinary American chestnut and 100 a resistant Chinese one, the best two scored 16 to 21 (TACF annual report).

Breeding, by DNA. For decades the Foundation crossed American chestnuts with Chinese ones and bred back toward the American tree. In 2019 its own genetic study found those trees fell short: resistance depends on many genes, and it fell as the American share of the tree went up (Westbrook et al. 2019). The Foundation now selects hybrids that are about 70% to 85% American, choosing them by their DNA. In 2025 it genotyped 5,808 seedlings, tested 1,250 of them against the blight, and found 15 families averaging 39 on the resistance scale, and planned three seed orchards, in North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania, for spring 2026, expected to produce restoration seed over the following seven to fifteen years (TACF annual report). On that projection, seed arrives in roughly 2033 to 2041, if the orchards went in on time. We have not confirmed that they did. The research behind the new approach was published in Science on 12 February 2026 (Virginia Tech release).

A tree with one added gene. The State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry has spent years on a chestnut carrying one gene from wheat that helps it tolerate the blight. In 2023 it emerged that the trees distributed and tested as its lead line, Darling 58, were in fact a different line, Darling 54. The Foundation withdrew its support in December 2023. It says it does not oppose further research, but that the line "should not be distributed or propagated beyond permitted sites" (TACF). On 27 August 2026, the Department of Agriculture's plant health regulator found Darling 54 "unlikely to pose a greater plant pest risk" than an ordinary chestnut and removed it from regulation (US Department of Agriculture). That is one regulator, not all of them. The Environmental Protection Agency's review is still open (TACF), and the college says the agency has "no precedent" for a long-lived wild organism (ESF progress report, spring 2026).

A fourth idea, a virus that weakens the fungus, has helped in some Michigan stands, with mixed results elsewhere (TACF).

On our reading of those timelines, a Blue Ridge slope with chestnuts back in the canopy is, at best, a sight for late in this century. The trees that are coming will be different from the ones that were lost: mostly American, chosen by their DNA, or carrying one gene from wheat. The giants in the photographs are gone. What the record gives back is a clearer picture of them, and of what really happened.

Next in the series: chinkapin, hickory, walnut and the other nuts that fed these mountains after the chestnut was gone.

Questions people ask

Is the American chestnut extinct?

Not quite. Forest survey plots measured from 2002 to 2012 put the wild population at about 431 million stems, but about 84% are small sprouts that the blight kills back before they can flower. The old canopy trees of the Blue Ridge are gone.

What killed the American chestnut?

Chestnut blight, a fungus called Cryphonectria parasitica, first noticed at the Bronx Zoo in 1904 and thought to have come from Asia. It girdles the trunk and kills a mature tree in two or three years, but not the roots. It reached the Great Smokies in about 1925 or 1926.

Did the Forest Service cut down the chestnut trees?

Not in the way the story is usually told. Timber companies felled living chestnut across the southern mountains before the blight arrived. Pennsylvania ran a state campaign from 1911 to 1913 to cut out infected trees, and some healthy ones around them, using methods from the Department of Agriculture, and Virginia and West Virginia followed. After the blight reached the south, most cutting there was salvage of dead trees. We found no source for a Forest Service campaign to fell living chestnuts across a mountain.

How big did American chestnut trees get?

The biggest reliably measured, at Porters Flat in the Great Smokies in 1933, was 28.5 feet around at four feet up, about nine feet across. Trees seven to nine feet across appear often in the record, but very few reached ten. A tree eleven feet around is about three and a half feet across.

When will the American chestnut be restored?

Not soon. The American Chestnut Foundation planned three seed orchards for spring 2026 and expects restoration seed in seven to fifteen years. A genetically engineered line, Darling 54, was removed from Department of Agriculture regulation on 27 August 2026 but still needs the Environmental Protection Agency, and its other approvals are not yet clear. On our estimate, chestnuts back in the Blue Ridge canopy are a prospect for late this century at the earliest.

Sources

1. Faison EK, Foster DR, 2014. On how dominant American chestnut was in the eastern forest, with witness-tree data. https://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7312037d-afdc-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b/content
2. Elliott KJ, Swank WT. Plant Ecology 2008;197:155-172. Forest change at Coweeta after logging and the loss of American chestnut, abstract on Treesearch. https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/31783
3. The American Chestnut Foundation and Penn State. Chestnut and wildlife. https://tacf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/chestnutand-wildlife.pdf
4. Minser WG and others, 1995. Wild turkey feeding trials with chestnuts and other hard mast. Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. https://seafwa.org/journal/1995/feeding-response-wild-turkeys-chestnuts-and-other-hard-mast
5. Opler PA, 1978. On the insects of American chestnut and their conservation. https://npn.rngr.net/publications/chestnut/1978/insects-of-american-chestnut-possible-importance-and-conservation-concern/at_download/file
6. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, TRACE 1609, on chestnut replacement in the Great Smoky Mountains. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/1609
7. Freinkel S, 2005. Alicia Patterson Foundation essay on the loss of the American chestnut, drawing on the work of Ralph Lutts. https://aliciapatterson.org/susan-freinkel/a-whole-world-gone-the-loss-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/
8. NCpedia. Fences. https://www.ncpedia.org/fences
9. Forest History Society. Champion Fibre Company, Canton, North Carolina, timeline. https://foresthistory.org/?p=97250
10. University of North Carolina. Cherokee foodways exhibit, western North Carolina. https://recres.sils.unc.edu/exhibits/show/western-main/western-cherokee-rockenbach
11. Mountain Xpress. On Cherokee chestnut bread and the cook Paul Dillman. https://mountainx.com/?p=555659
12. Final Report of the Pennsylvania Chestnut Tree Blight Commission. Harrisburg, 1914. Project Gutenberg 79481. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79481
13. National Park Service. Natural History Handbook 5, Great Smoky Mountains. https://npshistory.com/handbooks/natural/5/nh5g.htm
14. Davis DE, 2021. Forest History Today, on the size and age records of American chestnut. https://foresthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/FHT_2021_Davis_American_chestnut.pdf
15. US Forest Service, Southern Region. Mountaineers and Rangers, chapter 3. https://npshistory.com/publications/usfs/region/8/history/chap3.htm
16. Diller JD, 1957. Northeastern Forest Tree Improvement Conference, on blight-resistant American chestnut survivors. https://rngr.net/publications/tree-improvement-proceedings/northeastern/1957/natural-selection-of-blight-resistant-american-chestnuts-appears-promising/at_download/file
17. Roanoke College news, 17 May 2018. On research into inflated American chestnut sizes. https://www.roanoke.edu/news/new_research_explains_larger-than-life_perceptions_of_american_chestnut
18. Rochner ML and others, 2017. Tree-Ring Research, table 1, the Greenbriar chestnut chronology. https://geo.appstate.edu/sites/default/files/asu_profile_files/van_de_gevel_rochner_et_al_2017_cabin_paper.pdf
19. Dalgleish HJ and others. Forests 2016;7(1):4. Estimate of American chestnut stems from forest inventory plots. https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/7/1/4
20. The American Chestnut Foundation. Annual report 2024 to 2025. https://tacf.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/24-25_TACF_AR_compressed.pdf
21. Westbrook JW and others. Evolutionary Applications, published online 29 December 2019. On the genomics of backcross American chestnut. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6935594/
22. EurekAlert, 12 February 2026. Virginia Tech release on Westbrook and others, Science 391(6786):730-735. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1115372
23. The American Chestnut Foundation. Darling 58 and Darling 54 resources. https://tacf.org/resources-deregulation-darling58/
24. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. USDA deregulates American chestnut engineered for enhanced blight tolerance, 27 August 2026. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/program-update/usda-deregulates-american-chestnut-engineered-enhanced-blight-tolerance
25. SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Chestnut progress report, spring 2026. https://www.esf.edu/chestnut/progress-report/spring-2026.php
26. The American Chestnut Foundation, 10 January 2006. Summary of chestnut canker biocontrol. https://tacf.org/ct-news/a-brief-summary-of-chestnut-canker-biocontrol/