* * Carl Absher works to reintroduce the American chestnut

On a perfectly crystalline fall morning with wisps of fog hugging the lowlands, I rode my motorcycle to McDonalds Mill in the bucolic Ellett Valley to meet Carl Absher, a man working to let his grandson understand the legacy of the American chestnut tree that his grandfather knew.

“I’ve lived in this valley most of my life. I was born here and went to Virginia Tech. But I’ve only been aware of (the chestnut legacy) and proud of it and wanting to encourage it for the last few years. My degree is in forestry, but I’ve just begun to take pride in being in the center of the original chestnut range.”

The American chestnut tree was decimated by a fungus that was accidentally introduced to North America around 1900. By 1940, essentially every mature chestnut tree had been infected and destroyed. Because of the immense value of the resource, the devastation has been called the greatest environmental disaster the world has ever known. As many as a quarter of all the trees in our nearby forests were chestnuts. They grew straight and branch-free for 50 feet and sometimes exceeded 150 feet tall. The wood was light in weight, strong, easily worked, rot resistant, fire-resistant and attractive. Until its destruction, most homes and barns in its range were made from it. In profound ways, rural Appalachia took an economic hit from which it has never fully recovered.

“As a teenager when I first started hunting on the ridge across from the house, there were old, dead chestnut snags. I grew up in the house where I still live, as did my father. My grandparents settled here in the 1920s. My grandfather ran a store in front of the house. There were more people living in this valley 100 years ago than there are now. Before the advent of the railroad and the birth of Roanoke, the major transportation corridor was from Fincastle to Christiansburg and beyond, along this road. McDonald’s Mill, just up the road, was the center of the community. We had our own post office. Most of these hillsides were cultivated.”

He stroked his bushy, grey beard and continued, “There were lots of chestnut trees around. It was said that you had to get up early on fall mornings to gather the chestnuts before the turkeys could get them, because by afternoon they’d be all gone.”

In an era before the blight, with the immense ability of the chestnut to produce edible nuts, it was the cornerstone resource of an enormously more productive forest than we have now. A typical adult tree could easily produce 8000 nuts, feeding squirrels, deer, rabbits, voles, mice, raccoons, turkey, and other animals spawned greater populations across the food chain. And the chestnut population was probably higher when the blight hit than when the pioneers arrived because the settlers encouraged its use.

Absher is retired from a career in arboriculture, now working with the American Chestnut Foundation to develop blight-resistant strains to re-introduce the chestnut to its original forest range.

“When I was studying forestry at Tech, a professor had a list of 25 reasons why the chestnut would never again be part of our forest. But lots of people are determined to prove him wrong.”

Nowadays, scientists have increased their understanding of the fungus to the cellular and molecular level. But understanding it is only half the battle. Resistant strains must be developed and bred, and then propagated through the forests.

“There was lots of work going on at a farm at Meadowview (near Abingdon) and in Northern Virginia, but I wanted to do some work here in the New River and Roanoke River Valleys. I helped found an orchard at the Virginia Tech Sustainability Center in Catawba.”

European and West Asian chestnut trees are also susceptible to the blight, but less so. Absher and others are working to cross-pollinate the various strains to build better resistance in the American chestnut.

“We’re on the brink of breeding and releasing blight-resistant American chestnut trees to over 400 million acres. Because the seed is large relative to something like pine seeds, they are more difficult and expensive to distribute. But there are many avid, determined, and brilliant people working on it.

“I’m working for my grandson. I see in his future a mature forest including chestnut trees that are blight-resistant and that are self-propagating and sustaining, so he can enjoy the benefits of the nuts and the wood like my grandfather did.

“I’m not sure what this grand tree will mean to a generation that has cars and airplanes and the Internet, things my grandfather’s generation didn’t have. The chestnut is an annual, nutritious food crop that we don’t even have to cultivate, fertilize, or spray with pesticides. I hope future generations appreciate the value.”

More information about the American Chestnut Foundation can be found at their website at www.acf.org.