"But it was in Appalachia, in places like Patrick County, Virginia, where the ties between the chestnut and people were most tightly bound. 'If ever there was a place defined by a tree, it was Appalachia,' says folk historian Charlotte Ross, of Appalachian State University. The American chestnut 'was our icon. We loved that tree.'
"On the steep slopes and in the cool, moist hollows of the southern Appalachian mountains, chestnuts grew so abundantly that they accounted for as many as one in four forest trees, and in some places, even more. Chestnuts were big trees everywhere, but this land gave rise to giants – trees a dozen feet wide and ten times as tall. One Goliath in Francis Cove, North Carolina, measured seventeen feet across. In spring, the trees bloomed long bushy catkins of cream-colored flowers that filled the woods with a pungent perfume and made the forests look, from a distance, 'like a sea with white combers plowing across its surface,' as the naturalist Donal Culross Peattie wrote." (pages 17-18)
"No one needed to buy land to pasture cattle or hogs when the forests supplied such a wealth of forage. Farmers would simply notch their mark in the ears of their livestock and turn the animals loose to roam the woods until they were to be butchered or sold. A pig could grow stout as a barrel on chestnuts, acorns, and hickory nuts. That ample carpet of nuts, sometimes inches thick, allowed drovers to move huge herds of hogs, cattle, and even turkeys across the slopes of the southern mountains to supply food for laborers on the plantations to the Southeast. The wildlife that also feasted on the nuts ensured a steady supply of game for the dinner table. 'There wasn't no kind of game that roamed these mountains that didn't eat the chestnuts,' Georgia native Jake Waldroop recalled.' The chestnuts supported everything.
"Folklorist Ross believes the chestnut not only supported settlement in the Appalachians but invited it. The early Scots-Irish settlers wrote letters home describing the riches the woods offered. 'The chestnut mast is knee-deep,' one man boasted, referring to the heavy accumulation of nuts. 'C'mon over cousin,' another wrote to his family in Ulster, Ireland. 'This is the best poor man's country.' And their countrymen followed. Over time the mountains filled with enclaves of tough, independent-minded people who were used to wrestling a living out of the poorest farmland." (pages 19- 20)
From American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree by Susan Freinkel
