Remember the Chestnut!’ 
By AMANDA ULM 
[With 4 plates} 
During the summer of 1904, a num- 
ber of American chestnut trees in 
New York City’s Zoological Park 
withered and died. Many attributed 
the loss to the unusually cold winter 
of 1903, but Herman Merkel, the 
park’s chief forester, suspected some- 
thing more. He sprayed the trees 
with a fungicide and reported his 
observations to the United States 
Department of Agriculture in Wash- 
ington. No one became alarmed, 
however. Chestnuts were plentiful in 
the woods about the city and there 
was no evidence of anything wrong 
outside the Zoological Park. 
Yet within 7 years it was difficult 
to find an unblighted American chest- 
nut in the Empire State, and by 1940 
healthy specimens of this great tree 
had virtually disappeared from the 
woodlands of the East. Only in 
certain sections of Mississippi and 
Tennessee were unblighted trees still 
reported. 
To the present generation of young 
Americans the disappearance of the 
chestnut from the eastern woodlands 
is little more than a chapter of his- 
tory. And to their great misfortune 
they have been deprived of an asso- 
ciation that is still deeply etched in 
the memory of many of their elders. 
Henry David Thoreau undoubtedly 
spoke the minds of many when he 
wrote of this magnificent tree: 
When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a 
bushel for winter. It was very exciting at 
1 Reprinted by permission from American 
Forests, April 1948. 
that season to roam the then boundless 
chestnut woods . . . with a bag on my 
shoulder, and a stick to open burs with in 
my hand .. . amid the rustling of leaves 
and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels 
and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts I 
sometimes stole.... Occasionally I climbed 
and shook the trees. They grew also behind 
my house, and one large tree which almost 
overshadowed it was, when in flower, a 
bouquet which scented the whole neighbor- 
hood, but the squirrels and jays got most of 
its fruit. . . . I relinquished these trees to 
them and visited the more distant woods 
composed wholly of chestnut. 
Yet the story of the chestnut is one 
every American should know and 
ponder. For not only is it a tragic 
reminder of what can happen to a 
valuable resource when danger sig- 
nals are ignored, but it points with 
millions of dead and ghostly snags, 
all that is left of one of the most 
magnificent trees indigenous to our 
woodlands, to the fallacy of the kind 
of thinking that adds up to “‘too little, 
and too late.”” And unless the Ameri- 
can people show greater understand- 
ing of the destructive power of tree- 
killing diseases and insects, the tragedy 
of the chestnut can be re-enacted. 
The present plight of the American 
elm is eloquent testimony to this. 
The chestnut, of course, was more 
than a sentimental loss to the Nation. 
A superbly beautiful tree, often tower- 
ing 100 feet or more in the forest, 
it was of high commercial value, an 
important part of the Nation’s econ- 
omy. Its wood was durable and rot- 
resistant, ideal for telephone poles, 
shipmasts, and railroad ties. Great 
quantities were used for interior wood- 
377 
