To which he responded, according to Freinkel, "I was on this thing way before you were, and if you think you can do something here you're out of your mind!" The start of William Murrill's article in Torreya, a botanical journal, describing Chestnut blight. In fact, as the blight starts to do exactly what Murrill says it’s going to do, the government gets all the big tree minds and some clueless politicians together in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where someone actually accuses Murrill of not doing enough to stop the blight. Murrill studied the orange stuff on the trees, and a few years later published his findings under the title "A New Chestnut Disease." He concluded that this thing, what was eventually known as the Chestnut Blight, is going to wipe out all the chestnut trees in the region. The problem? No one believed him. He couldn't figure out what to do, so he called in a guy named William Murrill who had been recently appointed as the chief mycologist, or mushroom expert, at the botanical gardens across the way. The chief gardener for the Bronx Zoo was making his rounds and noticed that a couple of the trees had some orange speckles and signs that the branches were dying. The reason for their disappearance dates back to 1904. The tree Bruffee found is one of only a few hundred that still exist out of an original population of close to four billion. "If the chestnuts were around, they'd probably be selling them on eBay or through Amazon," adds Lutts.Ĭlearly, chestnuts are not so popular nowadays. Vendors roasted and hawked the nuts on the streets and city people gobbled them up. They were literally used as currency. "Come September, October, the only commodity they're trading in at the country store to get their groceries is chestnuts." The store owner then shipped those nuts to places like Philadelphia and New York City where chestnuts were a hot commodity. Lutts says that chestnuts weren’t just a celebrated bounty in those areas. And when you had the time of plenty in the autumn when the nuts were falling like manna from heaven, it was almost a community celebration." It was a central part of their lives economically, particularly the very poor.
"It was not just a food that was a treat to them. And the nuts were particularly important to Southern Appalachia, says historian Ralph Lutts: But the gem of the American chestnut was really the nuts themselves. They used to be so common along the East Coast of the United States that people would say a squirrel could travel from Maine to Georgia on chestnut tree branches alone without ever touching the ground.Ĭhestnut wood - naturally rot-resistant, lightweight and straight-grained - was also highly valued, used for everything from utility poles to railroad ties to houses. The species as a whole had a massive footprint. But it wasn’t just that the individual trees were large. They could grow up to 125 feet tall and 16 feet wide and were so big that loggers sometimes used actual dynamite to blow them up into smaller pieces. Up until the early 1900s, American chestnuts dominated the eastern forests of North America. It involves genetic engineering, warring factions of tree enthusiasts, and a mysterious, destructive force that was first discovered at the Bronx Zoo. You wouldn't know it from looking up at the tree from the side of the road, but the American chestnut is at the center of one of the most nutty stories of near extinction and resurrection ever heard in the United States. He prefers to keep it secret for fear of potential visitors looking for a souvenir. This tree could be part of the key to unlocking the future of this species, so Bruffee is one of the few people who knows its specific location.
The American chestnut tree in Western Massachusetts that forester Larry Bruffee discovered. These days, most trees of its kind die before they ever get half as big as the one Bruffee found. He had found a mature American chestnut tree, a species known to be practically extinct since the first half of the 20th century due to a catastrophic blight. To Bruffee, though, it was anything but normal. And that’s when I found this one here," Bruffee says as he gestures towards a normal-looking tree.
"So I came out to survey the clearing of the trees on this side of the road.
On a dirt road in a remote area of Western Massachusetts, forester Larry Bruffee recalls a memorable day from 2010 when he was working on installing a power line. "Happy Little Green Tree," 8x10 watercolor, by u/EdensQuill
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