Stand of chestnuts amazes scientists

American chestnut trees were nearly wiped out in an early 20th-century blight.

BRACEVILLE RIDGE, Ohio (AP) — Despite a deadly fungus that has wiped out most of their kind, a stand of rare American chestnut trees is growing in and around a sandstone quarry near this town in Northeast Ohio. For naturalists seeking to restore and spread the chestnut, it is a gold mine.

Within one square mile there are four large flowering chestnut trees and hundreds of smaller ones that have not begun to flower.

Greg Miller, president of the American Chestnut Foundation’s Ohio chapter, said Wednesday he knows of no greater concentration of naturally growing chestnut trees anywhere else in the state. There are chestnut trees elsewhere in Ohio, he said, but it is typically “one here and one there.”

“The main significance is they are kind of usable for the breeding program,” he said of the trees at the quarry. “We’re basically trying to capture their genes.”

At one time there were 4 billion American chestnut trees. Valued for their timber and whose nuts fed wildlife and served as a cash crop for farmers, the trees flourished among 200 million acres of eastern woodlands that stretched from Maine to Florida and as far west as the Ohio Valley.

An Asian fungus began infecting American chestnut trees around 1904 in New York City and nearly wiped all of them out. Most of the chestnut trees in Ohio died in the 1930s.

What’s left

Today, only a few tree-sized chestnuts remain; the tallest, at 60 feet, is found in Kentucky, according to the foundation.

Of the chestnut trees at the quarry, one stands nearly 75 feet tall, a specimen perhaps 20 years old with branches loaded with white flowers.

“We scratch our heads and wonder why these trees are here,” Miller said.

Because the eight-acre quarry sits at a higher elevation than the surrounding terrain, the chestnut trees may have been more protected from blight spores, he said.

Mac Swinford, assistant chief of the Ohio Division of Geologic Survey, calls the geology unique, with its sandstone knob that tops out at 990 feet above sea level. And the soil is acidic, which chestnut trees love.

Elden Shounce, who owns the quarry, built a dirt ramp for easier access to the trees once he found out they were there.

Miller has been implanting the tallest of the trees with blight-resistant pollen from the foundation’s research farm in Virginia. By a method known as back-crossing, Miller is hoping for a hybrid American chestnut tree that has enough of the tree’s genes to compete and thrive in the forest.

The goal is to make the trees about 1/16th Chinese, enabling them to carry the blight-resistance of the Chinese chestnut.

At the same time, thousands of chestnut trees have been planted recently by volunteers on strip-mined land in Ohio. Miller said they are simply practice trees to try to develop good planting techniques for the time that a good hybrid tree is developed.

Miller said the chapter is still two generations from producing seedlings for the forest. He said the chestnut trees at the quarry will probably eventually fall victim to the fungus.

“It’s a race against time,” he said. “It’s a now-or-never thing.”