It came from China

[YellowHammer]

Years ago I got a call from a local historical museum, "Burritt on the Mountain" nature trail, museum type of place where they had moved in old rustic buildings, had rare plants and stuff, and they had a natural, very small grove of chestnut still growing on the very isolated mountain property.  They say the trees get maybe 6 inches or slightly more in diameter and then just die, and they had one doing just that.  They had heard of me and asked if I would mill it into 4/4 for a "chestnut" display in the museum, and of course I agreed.

I wish I had taken pictures, but they showed up with one little stick, maybe 8 inch diameter, 6 or so feet long, and when I cut it up, it sawed like butter.  It is the only live chestnut I've ever seen.  I assume they still have the little grove of survivors there, I don't know, but it was pretty sad.   They treated the dying of the little tree almost like the death of a family pet, the horticulturalists and volunteers that work there were pretty sad.  It got me asking around because some old barns locally were made from chestnut so there are people here who had "kinfolk" in the past who had firsthand knowledge and told stories about the chestnut. 

One guy told me stories of his people telling him the loss of the chestnut was such a huge thing that it even changed the squirrel population.  They would tell him of there being hundreds, even thousands, of squirrels everywhere, enough to be a main staple of their ancestors diet, and then later, the squirrel populations fell to todays levels, which he said is nothing like it was.  Folklore was that a squirrel could travel through the chestnut canopies from state to state without  touching the ground.  There are even references to the dying chestnut trees causing a squirrel plague crossing several states like locust, eating everything including crops of corn, stuff like that.  Maybe it was just folklore, or exaggeration, I don't know, but he said they told stories of squirrels thick as fleas and feeding hungry families.     

[Rhodemont]

When I bought my property in 1983 I lived in the house for a week with Old man Pauli and his wife Irene.  They were in their mid 80's so had seen the day of the chestnut decline.  Each day he would show me around the house and walk some of the property and point out those chestnuts still trying to push up.  In the evening we sat on the porch with whiskey and crackers..oh what stories.  Emanuel also preached a squirrel could travel to Georgia without ever getting out of a chestnut. The last day before they head out for the final time we went to a thick area and there was the charred trunk and primary branches of a chestnut tree.  There was a huge fire in RI in 1938.  He said this was the last remanence of a big Chestnut which has since fallen and is now a pile of rot.  The fire was approaching the house and Irene said Emanuel made her go lie in the road so if a fire truck went buy it would stop and save the house. The whiskey may have influenced the stories but I believe them. (It took about 25 years that I lived on Pauli's place before it became mine)