Charity Of The Month
About
The American Chestnut Foundation
Our mission is to return the iconic American chestnut to its native range.
Our vision is a robust eastern forest returned to its splendor.
What We Do
Research
Our species-saving strategy is a powerful combination of breeding and biotechnology. The primary goal of our scientific research is to develop American chestnut trees with sufficient resistance to two deadly diseases: chestnut blight and Phytophthora root rot.
Restoration
The goal of our forest restoration work is to implement plantings of genetically diverse and disease-resistant American chestnut trees that are capable of sustained population growth across the native range in the ever-changing landscape of our Eastern hardwood forests.
Education
The American Chestnut Foundation is committed to raising awareness about the plight of the American chestnut and to fostering a new generation of conservation leaders through youth education, public talks, outreach activities, and demonstration plantings.
Our Values
Optimism
Patience
Science-based decisions
Innovation
Integrity
Collaboration
Adopted by TACF’s Board of Directors, these core values are organizational guidelines to ensure the mission to restore the American chestnut to the Eastern forests is a success. Because this mission involves a long journey and is the most complex rescue effort of any plant species ever undertaken, the organization will persevere with patience and optimism.
To accomplish its goals, TACF will make science-based decisions with the integrity necessary to evaluate its work and represent it to the public with transparency. Because of these ambitious goals and ever changing science, TACF must continually innovate and collaborate with its key stakeholders and overall constituency to remain open to new technologies and ideas.
History of the American Chestnut Tree
The history of the American chestnut and its relationship with humans is a tale of bounty, tragedy, and ultimately, of hope and redemption. The American Chestnut Foundation’s goal is to develop a blight-resistant American chestnut tree and to restore it to its native range across the eastern United States.
The American chestnut, Castanea dentata, once dominated portions of the eastern US forests. (View the American chestnut range map.) Numbering nearly four billion, the tree was among the largest, tallest, and fastest-growing in these forests. For thousands of years, the original inhabitants of the Appalachians coexisted with the American chestnut. (Read Indigenous Words for Chestnut.) The nuts provided an abundant food source, and Indigenous Peoples responded in kind by managing the landscape to improve habitat for chestnuts. Humans benefitted not only from the chestnuts themselves, but from the immense opportunities it created for wildlife.
Gathering Chestnuts, painting by Ernest Smith, with permission from the Rochester Museum and Science Center.
Chestnuts are dense with calories, rich in vitamin C and antioxidants, and the leaves contain higher levels of essential plant nutrients than other local tree species. This made the chestnut beneficial not only for the humans of an ecosystem, but for every level of the food chain. Chestnut leaves were favorites of detritivore insects who, by breaking them down, enriched the forest floor with nutrients. Insects feeding on chestnut leaves were then eaten by fish or birds, and other larger animals would feed directly on the chestnut mast like squirrels, deer, bear, and turkeys.
As European settlers arrived and displaced native peoples, they learned that chestnut wood was rot-resistant, straight-grained, and suitable for furniture, fencing, and building materials. It was preferred for log cabin foundations, fence posts, flooring, and caskets. Later, railroad ties and both telephone and telegraph poles were made from chestnut, many of which are still in use today.
The American chestnut tree was a significant contributor to rural agricultural economies. Hogs and cattle were fattened for market by silvopasturing them in chestnut-dominated forests. Nut-ripening and gathering nearly coincided with the holiday season, and late 19th century newspapers often featured articles about railroad cars overflowing with chestnuts to be sold fresh or roasted in major cities.
Jim and Caroline Walker Shelton’s family standing by a large American chestnut tree below Tremont Falls, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, circa 1920
All of this began to change in the late 1800’s with the introduction of a deadly blight from Asia. In about 50 years, the pathogen Cryphonectria parasitica reduced the American chestnut from its invaluable role to a tree that now grows mostly as an early-successional-stage shrub. There has been no new chestnut lumber sold in the US for decades, and the bulk of the 20-millon-pound annual nut crop now comes from introduced European or Asian chestnut species, or from nuts imported from Italy or Turkey.
Simultaneously, a fungus-like organism called Phytophthora cinnamomi, likely transported to North America a hundred years before the blight, was killing American chestnuts primarily in the southern part of the range. The disease it causes, called ink rot or Phytophthora root rot, kills the entire tree by killing the roots.
American chestnuts re-sprouting from roots
Despite its demise as a lumber and nut crop species, the American chestnut is not extinct. The blight cannot kill the underground root system as the pathogen is unable to compete with soil microorganisms. Stump sprouts grow vigorously in cutover or disturbed sites where there is plenty of sunlight, but inevitably succumb to the blight. This cycle of death and rebirth has kept the species alive, though it is considered functionally extinct.
The American Chestnut Foundation is working to develop a blight-resistant and Phytophthora-resistant American chestnut tree through scientific research and breeding, and to restore the tree to its native range in the eastern United States. You can support this mission by becoming a member and learning more about The American Chestnut Foundation.
More information can be found at:
tacf.org
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