Across the road from my house, presiding over a patch of lawn between my parish church and the old schoolhouse, there is a chestnut tree. I cannot say that the tree is particularly important to me; days can go by without my looking at it or taking any thought of it. And yet, if I turn my attention to it, I realize that my experience of this tree is bound up with much of what I know about where I live, my family, and the history of my country. I have sat in the shade leaning against its rough, ridged bark, noticing how its roots distend and break through the surface of the soil, as I read a book or watch my children ride their bikes. Every fall, I have kicked the prickly hulls, drying from yellowish green to rusty brown, that fall on the path that takes me and my family to Sunday Mass. I have picked up and comforted my youngest son after he tripped, tending to his wounded hand after it was pierced by the protective spines of the chestnut’s hull.
On a few occasions, I have squeezed the chestnuts out of their hulls under my shoe and gathered up the slippery dark nuts, making sure to avoid the ones that have started to rot or to sprout. I have scored these gathered nuts with a knife and roasted them—once in the oven, once on our outdoor grill—and eaten the pale yellow flesh with butter and a bit of cinnamon sugar. Some of those roasted chestnuts I ground into a mealy, pungent flour and tried to bake with it. My children find the roasted chestnuts tolerable but hardly a treat, and we all have found the chestnut flour good for nothing but the satisfaction of making something yourself. But we must be missing something, because every autumn, when the chestnuts begin to fall from the tree, I can count on the appearance of friendly, silent strangers, most likely pilgrims to the Marian shrine up the hill, stooping under the tree and gathering the dark, shiny nuts into bulging plastic bags. They have identified the rare tree from the road, or passed on knowledge of its location as a family secret, and they take its prized fruit home for use in what I imagine are generations-old family recipes brought here from China, Japan, or Korea.
I have never tried to identify the variety of this chestnut tree, but it is probably a “dwarf” chestnut or Allegheny chinquapin, or perhaps a more recent blight-resistant Asian hybrid. But it is not an American chestnut. I know this from its size and shape—about fifty feet tall, with an eighteen-inch-diameter trunk, bent and low-branching—but also from the fact that it is alive. In the hills above this chestnut tree and in the woods behind my house lie dead trunks, decades old—some of them more than three-quarters of a century fallen. They are victims of the devastating chestnut blight that reached Maryland a hundred years ago. Wind-carried spores, invading from Asia, entered cracks in the bark, spreading a foreign fungus that sickened and killed the cambium layer. Without a known treatment, or the ability to quarantine, the blight killed billions of this continent’s most sturdy and impressive trees, an ecological tragedy strangely correlated with the human catastrophes of the Great War, its tenuous aftermath, and the Great Depression.
Words most commonly used to describe the lost American chestnut include “proud,” “glorious,” and “majestic.” Elegies to the tree describe it as the fallen monarch of the country’s landscape. The rot-resistant wood barely decays, but weathers slowly, taking on the brushed, pale look of long-eroded stone. The corpses of these noble trees are almost unnatural in their persistence, like incorrupt bodies of saints.
The chestnut blight destroyed not just a species of tree but much tradition and culture as well. Lumber was a major industry in my part of rural Maryland. Chestnut wood was used for furniture, but also, because of its rot resistance, for fence posts, barrel staves, and trolley ties (though for heavier rail it was too soft and light). In Frederick County, chestnut bark was used for tanning leather, and the wood was burned in limekilns and glassworks. Just a few miles south of my home, charcoal from local chestnut fired the historic iron forge Catoctin Furnace, a major source of nineteenth-century pig iron for a young nation’s Industrial Revolution—and before that, for eighteenth-century cannonballs for our founding political revolution.
