American Chestnut

A formal ceremony to replant a small grove of Chestnut trees will be held at North Asheboro Park on Canoy Drive on Friday, Nov. 17. The program will begin at 2:30 p.m. and will include remarks by the mayor of Asheboro and Robert McCrory, arbor supervisor at the N.C. Zoo. The group will plant three trees in the park and two trees at the mayor’s grove there. Six children from Balfour Elementary School in Asheboro will help with the planting.The group will then move to the Asheboro Farmers Market on Church St. to plant two more chestnut trees at about 3:30 p.m. Six children from the local Boys and Girls Club will assist with that planting.

The ceremonies will commemorate one of America’s most important ecological disasters: the near loss of the American Chestnut Tree

Once known as the “Redwood of the East” because of its spectacular size, the American Chestnut Tree supported the ecology of eastern forest and the economy of the pioneers who swarmed through these woodlands into the 1800s.

Until the early 20th century, American Chestnut trees dominated forests from Maine southward to northern Florida and westward to the Ohio Valley. The average American Chestnut tree grew to a diameter of 60 inches, but the really old, really staunch trees could reach a girth of 8 to 10 feet and could stand as tall as 100 feet. These grand old trees blanketed almost all of the Appalachian Mountain chain and supplied the wood pioneers needed to build their homes, fences, poles, caskets and other artifacts.

Around 1904, someone noticed a fungus growing on a few American Chestnut trees in New York City. Introduced from the Orient, and commonly called "Chestnut blight," this fungus swept across the eastern United States, killing nearly every American Chestnut Tree on Earth. In the short span of only 60 years, the fungus destroyed more than 99.99 percent of the American Chestnut Tree population. The death toll claimed almost four billion trees on some nine million acres of eastern forests.

Today, the N.C. Zoo and other conservation groups such as Trees Asheboro and the American Chestnut Foundation, are working to bring back the American Chestnut by crossbreeding it with Chestnut species that are resistant to the Chestnut blight. Conservation groups are planting the hybrid, resistant trees throughout the former range of the American Chestnut.

“Anything that we can do to try to bring back something that has been on the verge of extinction or on the verge of disappearing completely from the world is a great step in the conservation of our natural world,” McCrory said.