There are some special trees that seem to be on this earth for their bountiful gifts. In the tropics, the coconut palm and the date palm are simply wonderful providers of food, shelter and useful tools. On the North American continent only one tree has ever been such a nutrition provider and supplier of useful materials. Our wondrous tree though, is almost extinct: the American Chestnut.

To understand just how an almost unknown tree rates such high praise it’s necessary to know a bit about some of the world’s other great tree providers: 

The Date Palm 
In the areas where date palms grow best like Africa, Arabia and Iran, they are necessary for the survival of a large per cent of the population. Much commerce depends upon the date palm and its byproducts. Dates are the main food for much of the rural people.

The fruit of the date palm contains 58 percent sugar and 2 percent each of fats, minerals and proteins. The leaves and stalks are used for building materials, ropes and mats.

Female trees bear up to 1,000 dates apiece annually, the total weighing as much as 270 kg. The date palm provides fruits after it reaches 7-9 years of age and bears fruit for about 90 more years.

The Coconut Palm
The meat of the nut, either green or ripe, is nutritious and can be eaten raw. Rendered, a rich oil is extracted from the kernel which can be burned to provide light, used as a skin lotion or for cooking oil. The smoke of the burning husk repels insects, the young palm hearts are a delicacy, the fronds can be used for building materials, the frond wrappers for toilet paper, the husks are good for fuel or for mats, every part of the tree has some use. 

How can a simple chestnut rate in the same class as these marvelous, life-sustaining trees?

Well, the American chestnut was a marvel itself.

The chestnut kernel stripped of its burrs,  provided 11% protein, 16% fat and thanks to a glucose (sugar) content of 14% was a tasty dish. Chestnuts carry 40% carbohydrates, primarily starch, making them an extremely high energy food. Equally important, the chestnut was a very reliable annual producer. Trees with a diameter of more than 24 inches produced as many as 6,000 nuts every year. The tree’s flowers mature in late June and early July, safely beyond the risk of frost damage, unlike oaks and were therefore more reliable. An entire eco-system was dependent on the chestnut with wild turkeys, raccoon, deer, bear, squirrels, insects, rodents and insects all dependent on the bounty produced. These marvelous trees made up as much as 25 per cent of the eastern hardwood forests for hundreds of thousands of years, returning northward and re-seeding after ice ages passed. They extended from southern Ontario to Georgia and west to the Mississippi. 

In the modern era, native people and settlers ate the nuts and used them to feed domestic animals. Appalachian settlers shipped railroad cars full of chestnuts to markets in eastern cities like New York and Philadelphia. 

Ontario settlers, living on the edge of the American chestnut’s range, enjoyed the food provided and harvested the lumber from mature trees that grew north of Lake Erie and on the western fringe of Lake Ontario.

 The trees were a lumberman’s dream. Often the first branches were fifty feet above the ground and the trees in a virgin forest could be giants. Averaging five feet in diameter and up to one hundred feet tall, some were much larger. According to old records and a few antiques, the wood was straight-grained, lighter and more easy to work than oak but as rot-resistant as redwood. It was used for anything and everything; musical instruments, shingles, fence-rails, quality furniture, railroad ties, home-building and gun stocks.  

And then they were gone.

In just a few moments of geological time, this bread and butter tree of much of the eastern part of the continent was wiped out by a blight imported accidentally from Asia. 

Nine million acres and more of forest were invaded by the blight and virtually none of the American chestnut trees survived. By 1950 they were little more than a memory.
 
But modern genetic research is coming to the rescue. It is just a matter of time until an American chestnut strain is developed with a resistance to the deadly Asian invader. A few trees of the original strain survive just long enough to produce nuts which are used to keep the tree from total extinction. The American  Chesnut Foundation is dedicated to this worthwhile project and someday, not in our lifetime, the spreading chestnut tree may return.