Chestnut Trees a Welcome Surprise
By Steve Bennish
BRACEVILLE TOWNSHIP, Ohio — For reasons that are something of a mystery, a square mile in this corner of northeastern Ohio has more mature flowering American chestnuts than any other place in the state.
Nearly every American chestnut perished from an Asian fungal blight that swept North America beginning in 1904, killing Ohio’s trees in the 1930s. The blight destroyed a forest mainstay that once numbered in the billions and ranged from Maine to Georgia. Its nuts fed wildlife from squirrels to black bears and were considered an important cash crop for small farmers.
Today, survivors are numerous, but usually are just sprouts that grow only a few feet before succumbing to the fungus.
The handful of trees in this part of Trumbull County shouldn’t be here — but they are. One stands nearly 75 feet tall, a specimen perhaps 20 years old, its branches loaded with white flowers. Anchored in a working sandstone quarry, it promises to be a key factor in the American Chestnut Foundation’s breeding effort to restore the chestnut to Ohio.
Sandstone offers clue to trees’ survival. Why does this American chestnut stand so tall in this rural, quiet corner of Ohio just west of Warren near the Mahoning River?
Some surprising explanations are offered by Greg Miller, president of the Ohio Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation. He owns the Empire Chestnut Co. of Carrollton, which breeds trees, including chestnuts.
Because the quarry sits at a higher elevation than the surrounding terrain, the trees could have been more protected from blight spores, Miller said.
Mac Swinford, assistant chief of the Ohio Division of Geological Survey, calls the township’s geology unique, with its sandstone knob that tops out at 990 feet above sea level. The base of the sandstone knob is at 935 feet above sea level and terrain near the Mahoning River dips to 880 feet above sea level. Sandstone is a very hard rock that stood up to the onslaught of glaciers that covered that portion of Ohio at times, Swinford said.
The soil here is acidic. Chestnuts love that. Because several of the trees grow in the century-old sandstone quarry, they were protected when land was cleared for farming. Some of the trees could just be more naturally resistant to blight.
“We scratch our heads and wonder why these trees are here,” Miller said.
Part of Miller’s job is to go up in a bucket truck and pollinate the tallest of the trees with blight-resistant pollen from the Chestnut Foundation’s research farm in Virginia.
By a method known as back-crossing, Miller and the Ohio Chapter are striving for a hybrid American chestnut that has enough of the American tree’s genes to compete and thrive in the forest.
They are striving for trees that will be about one fifteenth Chinese and — they hope — carry the blight-resistance of the Chinese chestnut. Following generations of the hybrids should be capable of rising up to 100 feet in height and refilling what has been a yawning ecological gap.
“We’re still two generations from seedlings for the forest,” Miller said.
Meanwhile, the blight is creeping onto this environmental island. “It’s a race against time,” he said. “It’s a now or never thing.”
Other isolated flowering American chestnut trees have been found in the U.S. In 2005, Alabama’s largest known American chestnut tree was found in Talladega National Forest. It stands 85 feet tall, 14 inches in diameter. It’s unknown how this tree has withstood the blight. Another survivor was found on a New Hampshire farm.
Originally published by Dayton Daily News.
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