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The Chestnut Exodus
Written By: Luke Osteen | Issue: 2021/08 – August
A second catastrophe in the 1920s scattered Toxaway families to the Pacific Northwest, and beyond.
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If you’ve been keeping up with my Toxaway accounts for the last couple of issues, you’ll recall that I was puzzled by the flurry of obituary notices ending up in The Crossroads Chronicle in the 90s about men and women of Toxaway who’d passed away at the other end of the continent in Oregon.
I’ve also mentioned that the Toxaway community was devastated by the collapse of the earthen dam that’d created Lake Toxaway and initiated the first wave of destination tourism and glamping.
But now we come to the second catastrophe that struck this little community and extinguished the livelihoods of so many of the people living in this corner of Transylvania County.
The Chestnut blight arrived in America in 1904, carried by infected chestnut trees imported from Asia.
This ferocious parasite spread quickly, and found a waiting buffet table in the deciduous forests that lined the Eastern Seaboard.
Here in Western North Carolina it was estimated that one in four hardwoods in our forests was an American chestnut.
And the vast chestnut forests that carpeted Toxaway were an economic treasure that’s never been duplicated. The wood of the American chestnut was lightweight, resistant to decay, and wouldn’t warp or shrink.
The bark and wood were rich in tannic acid, which provided tannins for use in the tanning of leather.
The tannins produced at Toxaway kept three local enterprises in operation – the Toxaway Tanning Company, the Rosman Tanning and Extract Company, and the Transylvania Tanning Company.
But those boom times ended with the arrival of the blight.
Families were devastated and the community shattered.
Yet some young men heard rumors of the deep forests of Oregon and Washington that needed skilled woodcutters to harvest their resources. These resourceful men and their families undertook a small-scale migration to the Northwest, where they’d rediscover the good jobs and comfortable lives that had been taken from them by that blight that still ravages the resilient local chestnut stumps that send up shoots in the spring, even to this day.
That explained the mystery of how my grandfather’s friend Uncle Mac ended up in an obituary sent from Oregon.
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