USDA Bulletin on Chestnut Blight and Cultivation of Blight-Resistant Trees
This image comparing chestnut varieties comes from the USDA Farmers’ bulletin No. 2068, issued June 1954. The bulletin details the history, spread, and symptoms of chestnut blight, which was accidentally brought to the U.S. around 1904 and is considered one of the greatest ecological disasters in our history. Most of the estimated four billion American chestnut trees in the forests of Eastern North America were decimated by the blight by the 1940s, with widespread negative effects on the woodland ecosystems where chestnut had been a keystone species.
As I am growing several chestnut trees myself and am very interested in the history and plight of American chestnuts, I found it fascinating to read what the USDA had to say about the issue 50 years after the introduction of the blight, considering we are now 120 years into it as of this writing. Of note, the importance of the American chestnut as a food crop cultivated by Indigenous peoples, and the subsequent disastrous effect the blight had on chestnut as a food source, was to me a glaring omission. That being said, this bulletin did a decent job of conveying the magnitude of the loss of the American chestnut, as seen in the figure below.
In addition to the information about blight itself, this farmers’ bulletin outlines the development and care of blight-resistant chestnut varieties. Below is a photograph of a person posing with fifteen-year-old first-generation hybrids of Chinese and American chestnuts, which showed more blight resistance than pure American chestnuts.
Lastly, I found it darkly amusing that in the section on care and cultivation of chestnuts, the USDA recommended the application of DDT, now known for its disastrous effects on ecosystems, and particularly on birds. Though not banned until 1972, the USDA was already acknowledging that it was harmful in 1954, writing in this bulletin that “DDT is a poison and should be handled carefully in accordance with manufacturer’s directions” (20).
This bulletin provides a striking snapshot of the aftermath of a devastating disease. Rather than end this post on such a bleak note, though, I’d like to direct anyone interested in reading about this further to this Edge of the Woods Native Plant Nursery post, where they document ongoing restoration and hybridization efforts. All is not lost!
United States Department of Agriculture. Farmers’ Bulletin No. 2068 (1954). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. Full text available via HathiTrust.
