An American Chestnut in Ohio
In late March I traveled to Huron to find something I thought had been lost forever: an American chestnut tree. American chestnuts are functionally extinct, but rumors have circulated for years that a fine specimen quietly thrives in Sheldon Marsh. I wanted to see it for myself.
This is no run-of-the-mill maple or oak. Great ranges of these sturdy, hundred-foot hardwoods bearing edible nuts once covered the better part of the Eastern Seaboard before a nasty fungal blight slayed them in just a few short years a century ago. Scientists of all professional and amateur stripes have since been trying to revive these trees and repopulate the mid-Atlantic. They’ve taken great pains to explain the importance of this mission, lately pleading with the federal government for funding. Amidst the anxious chatter about mass extinction and climate change, even in the most mainstream of local newspapers or magazines, the plight of the American chestnut is an easy proxy for the great moonshot of the twenty-first century: salvaging a devastated ecosystem.
Only recently has a loose-knit collective chanced upon a solution that may very well bring the American chestnut back to its former glory: genetic editing.
That plan is now in the hands of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which will have the final say on whether a blight-tolerant American chestnut strain called “Darling 58” may be unleashed on the wilds of North America. The USDA will likely come to a decision later this year, perhaps opening the door to a new era in which genetically modified trees may grow alongside old-fashioned regular trees.
In the meantime, you can still head out your front door and attempt to find a pre-blight American chestnut for yourself.
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The American chestnut was ubiquitous in earlier American epochs, its wood a suitable material for everything from furniture to telegraph poles. “Chestnutting” was a common hustle and hobby, with many nineteenth-century families in rural Kentucky and Virginia spending their autumns shaking loose and selling the nutritious hard nuts. Susan Freinkel’s American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree, published in 2009, captures this early history brilliantly, borrowing from oral history accounts of the tree’s significance in Appalachia.
“Farm conditions along the Blue Ridge were hard,” Freinkel writes. “But in the abundant chestnut trees settlers found a singular source of wealth.” The early chapters focus on Patrick County, Virginia, along the North Carolina border, though it’s not difficult to imagine similar scenes playing out in the Ohio River Valley in the late 1800s.
Subsistence farmers and homesteaders across Appalachia relied on chestnut harvests to supplement both their diets and their incomes. Chestnuts were vital to the diets, too, of livestock and game. Farmers and their children had to race their own hogs to the trees in the mornings after heavy winds in hope of capturing a chestnut bounty. Come autumn, chestnut harvests became the dominant economic activity for many families, and the trees were so plentiful that several could be felled for timber without being missed in the sprawling forest. It’s a tree that could easily slot itself into modern economic needs (and culinary tastes). Imagine new timber construction in the hippest Rust Belt neighborhoods, or a mushroom and chestnut risotto special at your local tapas bar.
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I found an old thread, from October 2011, on the Native Tree Society’s website: “Large American chestnut at Sheldon Marsh.”
A man named Steve Galehouse described his trip to the marsh, which is near Sandusky, and how he found the tree. “I'm glad to say the tree looks vigorous and perfectly healthy, with no sign of cankers or lesions on the bark of the trunk, and no sprouts emerging from the crown of the trunk,” he wrote. "There are still many burrs on the tree and the foliage is still fresh and green.”
James Parton responded: “Absolutely awesome! An 88.5 ft American Chestnut is rarer than gold! And a healthy one at that. I would love to see it.”
Rarer than gold!
I’d been feeling this tug to get out more, especially in the uneven wake of the pandemic, that any time I could spend outdoors was precious and meaningful in some way. The climate crisis only encroaches further on our day-to-day lives, with natural disasters scarring major cities and spiking the daily news cycle with apocalyptic imagery. I’d spent the past few years writing about animals and plants and landscapes around Northeast Ohio, getting out of my own comfort zone and into the woods, meeting people who knew much more than I did about mushrooms, birds, trees, and watersheds. I wanted to learn about the world around me and desired to find my way through the forest and put names to things—warblers and pines and rivers—before they were gone.
I have a one-year-old at home. My responsibility to the future seems more urgent than ever. I want to help my daughter understand her own place in her own time on this planet as she inevitably confronts the ongoing loss of life to the human grind of the twenty-first century, but I need to understand my place first.
The American chestnut gave me a chance to see something that actually was more or less gone from the natural world, to reach back into the distant past and get a sense of what climate destruction might rob from us again and again.
Countless people were pouring their lives into this mission to revive this tree. I needed to go out and find it. I needed to fulfill certain unspoken promises to myself about what “nature” and “the environment” and “loss” really meant to me.
“This is where the will to grapple with our hard and pressing environmental problems begins: in relationship to something other that you love beyond any utility, beyond any logic,” Freinkel writes, perhaps describing her own decision to spend time with this enchanting ghost of a tree.
Back on the ground, I wasn’t sure where to start. Galehouse left no real clues as to where the tree might be within the 465-acre marsh, and I certainly had no expertise in this field. He provided several photos, one of which I dubbed “the Galehouse Photo” and saved to my phone. It became the key to my trip, the one thing that might provide some direction as I looked to the past to make sense of the future.
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Any local reporter will tell you that the beating heart of a community can be heard in the public comments at a city council or school board meeting. I’d worked as a reporter for years in Northeast Ohio, dutifully logging citizens’ comments in public meetings from Medina to Willoughby. You get a good mix of heartfelt feedback and earnest perspectives, as well as the extremes of emotion—great fodder for storytelling. Sometimes you get some real loony-bin candidates on the mic—even better fodder.
It’s important to look at this cross-section of society squarely and take stock of how we feel about things. While I was arranging my own American chestnut journey, I poked around the public comment section of the USDA’s Darling 58 plan, a wide ranging proposal that would alter the great range of American forests east of the Mississippi River.
The Darling 58 is the long-awaited brainchild of researchers at the State University of New York in Syracuse. With help from the American Chestnut Foundation, the university’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry oversaw a program that culminated in a wheat enzyme being added into American chestnut’s genetic code. Not only is this enzyme familiar to us humans (we eat wheat), but it protects plant species from stuff like diseases and fungal blight. Darling 58 does everything the regular American chestnut did except die off at a rapid rate when attacked by Cryphonectria parasitica. The tree is named after Herb Darling, founder of the New York chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, and only one of the hundreds of people who were involved in this project over the years.
The USDA public comment archive might be the most complete picture yet of how America regards this iconic tree. There’s no easy way to organize those comments into a simple pro-/con- matrix, but suffice it to say that in my reading the most fervent attitudes seemed evenly split. It’s difficult to know what the USDA might make of all these comments; this is a complicated story, the revival of the American chestnut, and it’s become something of a knee-jerk proxy argument in the broader debate over gene editing.
The project garnered nearly 39,000 public comments, most of them impassioned pleas for one leg of the crossroads or the other: to propagate or not to propagate. A familiar theme emerged in many of these comments, an argument over whether we were right to “play God,” as in MaryAnne Okan’s comment: “He knows what He’s doing—you don’t!”
Elsewhere, folks clamored for the USDA to raise the gates and transform the planet with revitalized seeds. Here’s Grant Mullen: “Creating a blight tolerant American Chestnut tree is vital to the health of our forests and it would bring pride to our nation. We should be funding these endeavors urgently.”
And Austin Polling, opting for a more surface-level read of the Darling 58 project: “we need to make American chestnuts roast by the open fire again!”
As I read through comment after comment, the range of perspectives, the pros, the cons, and the ballyhoo, my own understanding of the American chestnut began to blur. I had to remind myself a few times just what, exactly, some of these people were even talking about.
Trees.
As the twenty-first century unfolds, the argument in favor of planting more trees and broadening our planet’s biodiversity seems like a surefire win. I’ve lived long enough to be able to see individual trees that I loved as a child grow taller and heartier. Returning to my childhood neighborhood or to parks I visited with my family, the saplings I knew back then now reach high above me. Trees remind us how, for better or worse, we all have the chance to leave a lasting mark on the world around us.
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I arrived at Sheldon Marsh and walked into the woods.
I scanned the forest, from one trunk to the next, my eyes alighting on chestnut-looking specimens. I kept thinking about how long this marsh had been here, and for how long it might remain. We are brutish stewards of the land, rampaging through history with our whims and ambition.
Rickey Buttery’s public comment summed up a lot of the anxiety in this journey: “This would be a massive experiment with an unknown outcome. Forests are highly complex communities of life. There is absolutely no way to foresee the consequences of such a release into the wild. Once they are out there, there will be no way back.”
There are about three trillion trees in the world, with one hundred to two hundred per acre in most forests. Some quick back-of-the-envelope math suggests there may be upwards of 46,000 trees growing in Sheldon Marsh alone. Of those, only one is an American chestnut. I had little to go off: an obscure 2011 webpage and “the Galehouse Photo,” as well as a smattering of field guide illustrations of American chestnuts. I couldn’t identify a single tree species in my own backyard, let alone a rarer-than-gold chestnut in a sprawling marsh.
I crossed the tree line. I pulled out my phone to orient myself once more to my threadbare clues. “The Galehouse Photo” included two notable characteristics: First, there was a smaller, thinner tree trunk next to the big chestnut. Second, there was a clearing in the background—whether a clearing in the marsh or the shoreline, I couldn’t tell. But what I was looking for would not be found in densely wooded areas, so right away that took a good three-quarters of the place off the table.
More than a decade had passed since Galehouse first reported his sighting. The tree could have changed significantly in that time. It could have sloughed off its old bark or twisted its trunk to avoid some slow calamity in the woods. A bad storm could have blown the thing down or a cabinet maker could have felled it for wood.
I attuned my eyes to the wall of tree trunks and leafy branches before me and walked on. The blue skies above delivered easy morning light through the canopy. Birds sang. Squirrels leapt madly. I checked my footing as I stepped over roots, glancing down and then up again at the woods before me. I felt small. There was something calming about this smallness, even as I felt a kind of hopelessness in my challenge to find what I’d come here to find.
The future of the American chestnut in Ohio and across the U.S. is in limbo. Will the tenacity of ongoing research and the great ambitions of a chestnut-scattered landscape win out over the concerns of genetic tampering, such as those of Rickey Buttery?
In Sheldon Marsh, I stood looking up at a tree that sort of looked like an American chestnut, but very well might not have been an American chestnut, thinking about how we are left to intuit a sense of meaning in what we are looking for, what we have found, trusting that vague sense in the core of our person.