Clear Day Thunder

Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: April 2024 | Photograph By: Andrew Renfro

Chestnut trees thrived on Planet Earth for 56 million years. Then suddenly, in the early 1900s on America’s Eastern seaboard, four billion American Chestnut trees were wiped out in a matter of years.

An Asian tree blight, Cryphonectria parasitica or chestnut blight, silently piggy-backing Japanese trade ships, slowly, relentlessly crept trunk to leaf to core all across the land. It left swaths of dying chestnuts and their accompanying ecosystems devoid of food and habitat.

When the blight took hold, scientists were at a loss. They hadn’t the tools, skills, and research we have today. In an effort to save the trees, forestry workers cut down many American Chestnuts, isolating tree stands, in hopes of preventing transference. Had they not felled so many chestnuts, the few trees among them capable of building immunity, might have saved the forests. Even worse, lumberjacks didn’t know to clean their tools. With each chop, they were injecting trees with doses of contagious blight.

American Chestnuts aren’t entirely gone. They still grow from ancient root systems throughout the Appalachians today. The blight can’t live underground. But once the Chestnut fledglings see daylight, they succumb to the persistent blight … long before reaching their previous 100+ feet. Sadly, they’ve become a hedge more than a forest. It’s a crushing thought that when Highlands was becoming a settlement, one in four trees was a Chestnut. By late 1930s . . . they were gone.

But there’s hope. Andrew Renfro, Land Conservation Director of Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust, shares this, “Researchers are working towards developing a blight resistant American Chestnut, suitable for forest-scale restoration efforts. In 2023 the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust was proud to screen the American Chestnut Foundation’s newly released documentary, Clear Day Thunder – Rescuing the American Chestnut, discussing their efforts using techniques such as crossbreeding and genomics, to develop and grow chestnut trees with sufficient blight resistance and representative genetic diversity to eventually enable landscape level restoration.”

On April 10 at 4:00 P.M. there’s an Albert Carlton-Cashiers Community Library screening. It’s free and you don’t have to register.

Andrew adds there are lots of ways you can help American Chestnuts through the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust, hcltnc.org. Or load a free App: Tree Snap. Be part of citizen science. If you find an American Chestnut in the woods, photograph it (name its location) and send it to the collaborators and scientists who support Tree Snap.