Chestnut Country:

An Environmental History of the American Chestnut in the Appalachian Commons

Jacob Johnson

The American chestnut played a critical role in the Appalachian ecosystem for millennia. The tree’s commonality to the region created an association that predated the name Appalachia itself, as the first European explorers noted, “Wherever there are mountains, there are chestnuts.”^[1] Although chestnuts made up approximately twenty percent of the total Appalachian forest at the turn of the 20th century, these trees most influenced the sandy ridgelines of the Blue Ridge (NC, VA, and WV) and the coal-bearing Cumberland Plateau (KY, WV, VA, and TN) sections of central and southern Appalachia.^[2] In these sections of Appalachia, the forests supported a “commons” form of land use, serving as the ecological base for both household subsistence and production well into the 20th century.^[3] Even to this day, many Appalachians supplement, if not entirely make, a livelihood out of their ability to hunt and trap game, fish, gather herbs and botanical remedies, graze livestock, grow crops, or just generally access land viewed as publicly owned, even if legally private. These practices and the people that maintain them continue to be some of the most definitive examples of commons systems and users throughout the entire United States.^[4] 

Despite its proliferation in the United States’ first full century, the American chestnut did not survive through the 20th century. When imports of the Japanese chestnut tree arrived in 1904 by way of the port of Brooklyn, New York, they accidentally brought with them a fungal blight that annihilated the American chestnut tree population through the first half of the 20th century. Often touted as one of the worst ecological disasters in history, the blight killed more than 3 billion mature chestnuts, creating ecologically apocalyptic shockwaves that rippled throughout the Appalachian forest. The continuous growth of new saplings provided optimism for the tree’s revival, but the blight caused a functional extinction of American chestnuts that typically die before maturity to this day.^[5] While this extinction resulted in a disaster for the Appalachian forest ecosystem, it paired with an economic crisis brought on by the enclosure of the commons by extractive industries. The American chestnut’s role in the Appalachian commons, its enclosure, and its decline call for a reimagining of how the commons functioned.

As a commons, Appalachian forests fostered an economic livelihood around the American chestnut as mountaineers traded chestnuts for cash. The Appalachian forest also functioned as an ecosystem, in which the American chestnut was a keystone species. The ecological base, though critical to understanding the plight of agrarians not only in Appalachia but globally, carries a strong anthropocentric bias.^[6] This human-centered view undermines the role that non-human actors, such as the chestnut, played in maintaining the commons. Drew Swanson better described this overlap between human and non-human actors as a “meeting ground,” which he saw especially manifested in Appalachia’s “most famous invasive,” the chestnut blight.^[7] However, he did not place these Appalachian meeting grounds within the context of the commons. Connecting the tree’s importance to Appalachian wildlife, Donald Davis alluded to the severe repercussions of chestnut blight on animals, who struggled without the tree’s high caloric output of mast—fallen chestnuts.^[8]

Making Chestnut Country

The inter-species dependence on the tree, including people, wildlife, and later livestock, represented a rather unique relationship into what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls a “maple nation.” In this nation, the maple trees of her Indigenous community provided services to residents year-round, ranging from firewood in the winter to shade in the fall, with the primary meaning of citizenship being the enjoyment of the tree’s provisions and the cyclical maintenance it required.^[9] The American chestnut provided similar, if not quantitatively greater than the maple, services to both Appalachia’s Indigenous peoples and the settlers that dispossessed the land from them. The currency of this country, rather than carbon as in the maple nation, was chestnuts.^[10]

The nut itself was the primary impact of the chestnut throughout both the Appalachian forest and its commons. Compared to other mast-producing trees, chestnuts were consistently more common and significantly produced a greater number of nuts than other species.^[11] While this output fed much of the region’s game, it also fed people. In the Middle Archaic period, beginning 8,000 years ago, Indigenous people pioneered the Appalachian commons by settling in proximity to game-filled stands of chestnut.^[12] These stands provided a prime hunting ground for subsistence from not only chestnuts but also the abundance of wildlife, ranging from squirrels to bears and most everything in between. By the end of the Late Archaic period, 3,200 years ago, chestnuts accounted for 70% of all “nutmeat” in the Cold Oak rock shelter of eastern Kentucky.^[13] 

Though this extraction of chestnuts for subsistence was minimal, Indigenous peoples knew how to maintain a balance, and even create an abundance, of chestnuts for themselves and for the surrounding wildlife. Also during the Late Archaic period, Indigenous peoples at Cliff Palace Pond, just below the Cold Oak rock shelter, began using fire to clear the predominantly cedar forest. By the time of European settlement in Kentucky, the chestnut had boomed from one percent of the forest to 19% of the state’s Appalachian forest because of these prescribed burns.^[14] Although these practices continued among the Cherokee long enough to be outlawed by the state of North Carolina, the Euro-American settlers that entered eastern Kentucky never met these Indigenous peoples.^[15] Disease along with Indigenous enslavers, such as–but far from limited to–the Iroquois, pushed the Fort Ancient peoples of southern Ohio and eastern Kentucky out of the region by the 1680s, nearly a century before White settlement.^[16] Even though no mention of Fort Ancient exists in the European historical record, the colonization of the continent sent shockwaves that destabilized Indigenous worlds across the United States although the area remained far from uninhabited in later years.

Shifting Ground

 The introduction of capitalism, one of the most radical and dynamic cultural exchanges in human civilization, altered perceptions of the land and its wildlife. Southern capitalists, often looking to afford plantations for themselves, invested heavily in the deerskin trade in Appalachia. Cherokee hunters alone killed more than 150,000 deer a year by the mid-18th century.^[17] Without any clear perception of ownership, from either Indigenous or settler populations, Kentucky came to be regarded as a prolific hunting commons. This reputation attracted a unique class of yeoman hunters, embodied in Daniel Boone, to settle the region.^[18] As deer populations slimmed throughout the colonial period, their concentration in the predominantly chestnut and oak forests of Appalachia fueled the frontier’s expansion.^[19] 

Indigenous peoples were far from willing to give away their hunting grounds, so Euro-Americans slowly pushed those hunters out. Because of competing claims from the Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, and Iroquois, none of whom permanently resided or hunted in the region, most soon-to-be Kentuckians never recognized any Indigenous ownership.^[20] While Euro-American settlers contributed to overhunting and the eventual extinction of elk and bison from Appalachia, their most devastating impact was the introduction of hogs and other livestock. These newly introduced, and arguably invasive, animals competed for space and resources alongside humans and wildlife, virtually eliminating the chance of surplus mast and straining the Appalachian forests’ food supply.^[21] 

Rather than a total enclosure of the commons, the White settlement of Appalachia represented a racial enclosure that sought to exclude only Indigenous people on the grounds of White privilege. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, White Appalachians continued commons practices in their land use. Although wildlife populations were rapidly depleting, many Appalachians still depended on deer, turkeys, bears, squirrels, and other remaining game for subsistence. This depletion necessitated and maintained the existence of Kentucky’s hunting commons years after Indigenous removal, complicating the establishment of private property.^[22] 

The livestock that White settlers let freely graze the Appalachian forest represented another form of racial enclosure that threatened the commons. Scientists and environmental historians need further research into the exact ecological impact of livestock’s introduction to Appalachia, but the population of nearly 400,000 hogs and 139,000 cattle by 1860 must have put a strain on eastern Kentucky’s carrying capacity.^[23] They further limited the number of chestnuts, along with many other edible and medicinal plants, that Indigenous people and native wildlife had historically depended on. The felling of chestnut trees throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, whose wood settlers prized for its rot-resistant qualities, literally displayed this enclosure by taking an exponential number of annual chestnuts out of the ecosystem. In an article that ran in the Big Sandy News in 1888, a local resident remembered, “On a farm near where I live are chestnut rails still doing duty in a fence that were split in 1815.”^[24] While the fence impressively still stood, it had at least come at the cost of decades of those chestnuts’ annual mast production—even if minimal compared with future losses.

Apart from this racial enclosure, little had changed about the dietary importance of chestnuts to settlers from the Indigenous gathering commons. In October 1893, a resident of Blaine, Kentucky, wrote to the Big Sandy News that “Business is dull, chestnut hunting and potato digging being the order of the day.”^[25] That chestnut hunting was a “dull” business in the fall months of the year speaks to the routine nature of gathering them; they had become inseparable from other harvest-time activities, such as potato digging. Most other residents, however, found chestnut hunting to be rather exciting. People writing to the Big Sandy News repeated this phrase every October in tandem with other agrarian or commons-linked practices, further demonstrating the entrenchment of the chestnut in Appalachian society. In her visualization of the “seasonal round” of the commons, Mary Hufford identified chestnut gathering as a regular October activity alongside potato digging and squirrel hunting.^[26] These were far from the only late fall activities that overlapped, though. For instance, a letter from Leander, Kentucky, to the Big Sandy News in October 1916 stated, “The neighbors are busy making sorghum and gathering chestnuts,” but they disappointingly concluded, “Our chestnut crop is very light this year.”^[27]

Figure 1. Annual cycle of events on Coal River. Design by Mary Hufford.

The region’s relatively new settlers had, however, added one new critical function to the chestnut-gathering commons. Throughout Appalachia as well as much of the eastern half of the country, chestnuts operated as a substitute for cash in country stores, and store owners distributed chestnuts to urban markets.^[28] Once harvested from the ecological base, the Appalachian forest, chestnuts transformed into a commodity that allowed them to be bought, sold, or bartered. Unlike other resource exchanges, chestnuts represented a “commons commodity,” meaning that the ownership of fallen chestnuts did not require ownership of the land if it was from an “unimproved” forest. Instead, the act of harvesting defined the ownership of a commons commodity whether it be a chestnut, deerskin, or persimmon.^[29] 

By contrast, some farmers kept personal chestnut orchards. In 1911, Louisville’s Courier-Journal carried a story from the Beattyville Enterprise that reported of an “enterprising” farmer named Rufus Hill, who had “the largest chestnut orchard in the country, perhaps…with 1,160 trees.” Unlike the unimproved forest, a chestnut grove functioned as an extension of the farm, just as much the private property of the farmer as any other yield-producing plot. At harvest time that October, therefore, Hill expected the personal profit of all that “he gathered,” which was “a little more than thirty and a half bushels of chestnuts from it this year.”^[30] But because the tree's production was so prolific, owners of chestnut orchards often allowed people to gather chestnuts under the same rules of those in the unimproved forest.^[31] In short, the overall production of chestnuts was so bountiful that it was not economical for a single owner to harvest them.

None for All and All for None

A light crop of chestnuts, or of most anything gathered from the commons, always had underlying ecological implications. In the case of the 1916 crop, a blurb in the Big Sandy News in November detailed how “worms [developed] rapidly in stored [chestnuts], and the safest plan is to fumigate them.”^[32] Although the Big Sandy News never identified the species of worms devastating the chestnut crop, they were only one of many inter-species “meeting grounds” in the chestnut-dominant Appalachian commons. For instance, a resident of Skaggs, Kentucky, reported in 1919 that “Chestnut and possum hunting is all the go here.”^[33] Though it was likely that opossums were part of some mountaineers’ diet, there was also an economic incentive to pairing the hunts. In 1909, a decade earlier, someone had written to the Big Sandy News, “Chestnuts are abundant in the grocery stores, but the [persimmons] must have been cornered by the possums. None are on the market.”^[34] Humans competed side by side with a wide variety of animals for the chestnut and other commons commodities, so the link between chestnut and possum hunting could have just as likely been to stamp out competition. Although the tree’s mast was rather consistently abundant, the consumption from people, wildlife, and livestock rapidly drained that abundance.^[35] The overlap Hufford noticed in the commons between squirrel and chestnut hunting in October reflects such layered inter-species functions. ^[36] Chestnuts acted as a lure for squirrels, and mountaineers killed them for their meat, protecting the economic value of chestnuts from one of its biggest consumers.

As the chestnut blight spread from the northeast, killing billions of trees in roughly three decades, the price of chestnuts wildly fluctuated. While historian Ralph Lutts found the state of Virginia’s 1914 amount of $200,000 in the chestnut trade to be an underestimation, he also argued the trade had exploded as the blight continued to kill trees nearer to urban markets.^[37] References to the fluctuation in the price of chestnut in the Big Sandy News suggested the latter was more likely. In October 1915, a correspondent reported, “There is a bumper chestnut crop—the best in years ripening in the mountains.” “Already many people are going into the mountains from the settlements to gather them,” the report continued. “They are selling for from $1.25 to $1.50 a bushel.”^[38] By 1922, a store in Blaine, Kentucky, placed an ad in the Big Sandy News: “Want chestnuts at $3.20 [a bushel].”^[39] The near tripling of prices over the course of only seven years implies the heavy toll of the blight on trees outside of the region. Eastern Kentucky had the least access to urban markets of all Appalachian states in this era, so the price fluctuations were considerably lower than in other areas. However, the price’s tripling within eastern Kentucky’s comparably locally contained market reflected the severity of chestnut blight on both the markets and the environment. Still, the prosperous chestnut commons, and their most vital currency and resource, were well in decline by 1922.

Industrialization added a final layer of value to the chestnut’s wood and bark, but this layer drastically undermined the ecological and economic value of the nut itself. The American chestnut’s wood had always held great value to Euro-American settlers not only for its abundance but also its rot-resistant qualities.^[40] Appalachian farmers and logging companies alike first commodified chestnut wood in eastern Kentucky through splash dam methods of logging, which used the region’s internal rivers to transport felled logs to market for a modest profit.^[41] Although these operations were most commonly run by local men, they could have a rather exploitative nature that overlapped with industrial interests. For instance, Verna Mae Slone, who lived on the Knott and Floyd County border, recalled in her memoir What My Heart Wants to Tell: “a large lumber company named Cole and Crain [sic] came to Caney Creek to buy up all the trees.” The company sent local resident Hayes Johnson as a foreman to construct and oversee a splash dam operation there as well. But Slone continued, “After Hayes Johnson got all the trees he wanted, and, maybe became a rich man from the profits, he left Caney Creek.”^[42] 

Likewise, the tanning industry encouraged mountaineers’ exploitation of the tree’s bark. In 1916, the Big Sandy News happily reported the opening of a new tannery, “where they will manufacture [leather] tanning acids, drawing their timber supply from both Southwest Virginia and Eastern Kentucky,” that was expected to hire 1,500 to 2,000 people. The report continued, “Chestnut will be largely needed.”^[43] However, chestnut oak remained the preferred tree of the tanning industry in eastern Kentucky, but many local tanneries accepted American chestnuts as a secondary preference. For instance, the Tanners & Dryers Company placed an ad in the Big Sandy News in 1907 that called for “10,000 cords [of] Chestnut Oak tan bark…. Also 10,000 cords of Chestnut wood.”^[44] Yet, as Kathryn Newfont observed of tanbark gathering commons in North Carolina, eastern Kentuckians probably continued to use chestnuts for tanbark long after the trees had died to blight.^[45]

While farmers and settlers had long cut down the tree, the impact was never as drastic as it became after industrialization. Railroads provided the transportation for large, mechanized logging operations in eastern Kentucky, which left the region deforested.^[46] However, companies eased the minds of sellers by offering sizable sums of money. Eastern Kentucky came out of the Civil War in mounting debt, and by 1910 the average amount of debt among Floyd County residents was $278.56.^[47] Appalachians faced an increasingly tough choice between the fast cash offered in felling chestnuts and the long-term benefits of the tree. Many residents proved increasingly willing to take the short-term benefits of felling the tree as the blight spread southward, which only further hastened the decline of the tree and the commons. For example, Jay H. Northup advertised in the Big Sandy News the sale of several farms he had acquired, citing his old age and blindness. One of these farms, however, already had “Seven hundred poplar and chestnut trees cut down…. worth $15,000. Will take $20,000.”^[48] By felling an unknown, but presumably large number of chestnuts, ironically, Northup had significantly damaged the agricultural value of the farm as the chestnut’s mast was so critical to mountain animal husbandry.^[49] 

This behavior was far from unique in terms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Appalachian commons. As Luke Manget demonstrated in Ginseng Diggers, the strenuous economic effects of the Civil War in West Virginia prompted mountaineers to harvest ginseng unsustainably for short-term economic gains. Many contemporaries, especially store owners, thought this turn toward ginseng harvesting was bringing about the extinction of the plant.^[50] The use of such commons commodities, at least in eastern Kentucky, worsened the debt economy by creating soured and indebted relations between wholesalers, country store owners, and customers.^[51] Opportunities to sell chestnut wood for fast cash to repay debt were abundant. In 1898, the Louisa Telephone Company placed an ad wanting “sealed bids on from forty to fifty chestnut poles, 35 feet long and six inches at the tip.”^[52] However, as historians Steven Stoll and Ronald L. Lewis have argued, the lumber industries’ large-scale deforestation of the Appalachian forest rapidly depleted the ecological base of the region.^[53] The influence of these industrial interests promoted the enclosure of Appalachia’s commons too, but as Davis indicates, scholars have overestimated the actual impact of this attempt at enclosure.^[54]

Although logging had a detrimental impact on affected areas, sawmills did not impact all of Appalachia. At least some Appalachians must have intrinsically understood that the chestnut was exceptionally critical to that ecological base. For instance, the Big Sandy News reported that Judge George Carson of Wolfe County, Kentucky, had “sold to the Weinart Stave Company, of Louisville, a boundary of timber embracing three or four hundred acres for $6,000,” but had also “[reserved] the chestnut and black locust that is standing upon the ground.”^[55] Although this deal may have just been speculating on the wood's future value, Carson may also have wanted to preserve those trees for their commons functions.

The fact that a similar deal happened in Breathitt County in 1903 further implies some reasoning behind the selected trees. According to Breathitt County News, James and Zerilda Cope sold “all the timber on their land, except chestnut and locust, situated on Frozen Creek… for the sum of nineteen thousand dollars.”^[56] Despite not being native to the Appalachian forest ecosystem, black locust trees added nutrients ranging from nitrogen, iron, potassium, and magnesium into the soil.^[57] While locust trees enriched the soil, chestnuts enriched the grazing and gathering of livestock, people, and wildlife. Mountaineers hunted wildlife, often around American chestnuts, for their meat and skins. Moreover, if there was a need for a few quick dollars or something else from the country store, chestnuts operated as a cash substitute. As both the black locust and the American chestnut held significant benefits to agrarian life in Appalachia, this monetization most likely drove the decision to protect those trees.

This tendency among some mountaineers to preserve some, if not all, of their forest created a patchwork layout of enclosed, deforested, and commons spaces. As Davis later corrected himself in The American Chestnut: An Environmental History, absentee owners could not perfectly monitor their land and Appalachians continued their commons practices.^[58] The operations that attempted to monitor their land typically relied on local residents, whose loyalty to kith and kin almost certainly allowed them to ignore some commons practices–if only for cousins and family friends.^[59] The Breathitt County News best captured this dual continuation and enclosure of the commons. “A Jolly Crowd,” published in October 1903, detailed a family outing that “reported a pleasant day gathering pawpaws, chestnuts, persimmons, and frost-ripened, autumn-flavored fruits.” That starkly juxtaposed this story further down the page with a warning:

Notice!

Any person or persons cutting down chestnut trees for the fruit, or otherwise cutting timber or trespassing on the lands of the Kentucky Union Company, the Goff Land Company, the George’s Branch Cannel Coal Company, or the Lost Creek Coal Company, in Breathitt, Perry, Powell, Lee, Wolfe, or other counties in the State that they have property in, will be indicated for such offenses and prosecuted to the extent of the law.^[60]

Despite the increasing corporate power pushing to enclose the commons, many Appalachians continued their commons practices well into the 20th century.

As coal mining became the predominant industry in eastern Kentucky, the emphasis on enclosure waned. Likewise, the environmental impacts of the logging industry, whose deforestation acted as an enclosing force itself, were far more pronounced than coal’s impact on the commons.^[61] On November 23, 1916, Consolidated Coal announced plans to reforest its “100,000-acre holdings in Letcher county during the next few months.” The company had planned “reforesting [with] locusts, mulberry, oak, poplar, and chestnut…including 60,000 black locusts.”^[62] The construction of a coal town like Jenkins, ironically, had caused most of the deforestation of Consolidated Coal’s holdings, as the company ran three sawmills to feed the burgeoning town a steady stream of lumber. ^[63]Although the growing class of miners remained dependent on many of their commons and agrarian means of subsistence and production, chestnuts were only briefly important as a survival strategy within the coal camps.^[64] 

The chestnuts left by lumbermen, unfortunately, did not survive for long. By 1921, The Mt. Sterling Advocate was already lamenting that “Millions of feet of the finest kind of lumber for ordinary purposes could have been saved if stricken chestnut trees had been cut when attacked by the blight.”^[65] By the time the blight finally reached eastern Kentucky in 1904, the financial loss of the American chestnut, in terms of the tree’s many functions, represented the loss of only more recent developments. Much more significantly, one of the most common keystone species within the ecosystems of Appalachia only haunted the forest now. The chestnut, rather than a meeting ground between the tree and humans who extracted its value, acted as a multilayered and multifunctional meeting ground between humans, markets and capital, and the ecosystems of the Appalachian forest.

Conclusion

As had been the case in the creation of the commons, during the Middle Archaic period 8,000 years ago, the nut remained the most crucial element of the tree. For thousands of years, the Cherokee of central and southern Appalachia had depended on the tree. The chestnut blight erased new dependencies, like grazing hogs in the forest, just as well as centuries of traditional practices in less than four decades. Scientists estimated that the American chestnut’s disappearance from the Appalachian forest represented the loss of 34% of the total mast production in the forest.^[66] In oral history interviews, Davis observed the devastating effects that such a loss had on wildlife, as residents recalled the sudden disappearance of not only all animals that depended on chestnuts but also the predators that depended on chestnuts’ consumers. Although chestnut supplies dwindled during the Great Depression, competition for those remaining raised to the point of murder in some communities.^[67]

For the wildlife and livestock dependent on the tree as well as the people dependent on all three via the commons, the effect was the same: a total decline. Chestnut blight and the functional extinction of the tree had severe repercussions on the ecosystems and economies of not only eastern Kentucky but all of Appalachia. In 1953, nearly at the half-centennial anniversary of the chestnut blight’s arrival, Bernard Whitt wrote “Goodbye, Mr. Chestnut” to the Licking Valley Courier. Whitt reminisced as he “visited the old chestnut orchard at the Green Salyers farm on White Oak,” recalling it was there, he wrote, that “Fifty years ago as a boy I gathered sack fulls of chestnuts on the hill.” Although it was technically private property as a chestnut orchard, “Green Salyer let the neighbors get what they wanted” in the same way as a commons.^[68] Whitt followed up in the Licking Valley Courier after he spent “four days last week in the woods hunting squirrel.” He reminisced further, “It had been fifty years since I hunted and killed squirrels there... [but] I saw only one chestnut in all my hunting, and this tree stands back of Herbert Hammond’s.” He then continued with a public plea to Hammond, whom Whitt thought “may not even know it’s there,” to “protect it, and have Harold Barber, the State biologist,” research the tree.^[69] As this recollection demonstrated, the Appalachian commons had survived well into the 20th century, even if most chestnuts had not survived with them.

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