GENERAL PAPERS . 143 
THE CHESTNUT IN ILLINOIS 
WILLIAM TRELEASE, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
Among a collection of exquisitely prepared photographs of 
trees and sections of their wood presented to the University of 
Illinois some years ago by Mr. B. T. Gault, of Glen Ellyn, the 
chestnut, Castanea dentata, is represented from between Olm- 
stead and Caledonia in Pulaski County. So far as I have been 
able to learn, this is the only place in the State where chestnut 
trees are known to occur except where they are known to 
have been planted by man. Inquiry in the river counties has 
brought the statement by several elderly men that in their 
youth they knew the chestnut as wild “in the hills of Pulaski 
County”: but these statements have resolved themselves into 
reference to a single grove near Olmstead. 
It was in this grove that, in 1900, Mr. Gault photographed 
a tree apparently four-and-a-half or five feet in diameter of 
trunk, and prepared a wood specimen from one of its branches 
about three inches and a half in diameter. A tree of this size 
may have been between 200 and 250 years old, Even if this 
estimate of its age (based on an average annual addition of a 
wood ring an eighth of an inch thick) should be a little high, it 
is evident that such tree must have antedated by very many 
years the occupation of this part of the country by white men. 
Pulaski County constitutes the middle of the extreme south- 
ern part of Illinois, along the Ohio River which separates 
it from Kentucky, and by an air line not over 65 miles below 
the mouth of the Wabash River, which separates it from 
Indiana. 
In Indiana the chestnut is said by Deam to reach Gibson 
and Posey Counties, which constitute the point between the 
Ohio and Wabash Rivers at their confluence. In Kentucky, 
Garman shows that it reaches Crittenden and Ballard Coun- 
ties in the western part of the State along the Ohio River; the 
former between the points where the Wabash and the Cumber- 
land Rivers discharge into the Ohio; and the latter between the 
mouth of the Tennessee River and the point where the Ohio 
empties into the Mississippi. Ballard county in Kentucky is 
separated from Pulaski county in Illinois merely by the Ohio 
River. 
