Fall harvests in Maine once included a crop few of today’s farmers and homesteaders grow: American chestnuts.
The spiky nuts were a food source for people, livestock and wildlife; the wood grew quickly with a straight grain and resisted rot, making it valuable for construction and furniture. About 4 billion of the trees once spread from Georgia to Maine, according to the American Chestnut Foundation.
Today, almost all are gone, victims of a blight that arrived from overseas and made the species functionally extinct around 1950.
Maine has more wild chestnuts remaining than any other state, according to the local chapter of the foundation, and there might be up to 200 sites here where they still grow. Groups such as this one have spent decades trying to keep existing trees producing and create new genetic types to resist the blight.
This year, the chapter tried a new strategy: planting American chestnut trees in public places all over the state instead of large, private research orchards. Organizers are focusing on attracting new volunteers, involving schools and building communities around the trees, which is the key to keep their work going and prepare for the resistant chestnut they believe will one day appear.
The idea came from a setback: a major chestnut research lab stopped supporting the development of a genetic line mixed with blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts that members had been devoted to for years.
As the Maine chapter figured out what to do next, members realized they didn’t have the network to get a huge volume of trees planted, even if a perfect, blight-resistant version appeared tomorrow, vice president and outreach coordinator Eva Butler said.
The new project, “Chestnuts Across Maine,” started as a pilot this year and met with success. If all goes according to plan, a public chestnut grove will grow within an hour’s drive of every Maine town and a 10-minute walk from every school.
About 80 seedlings were planted in 2024 at land trusts and two Bangor schools: the Mary Snow Middle School and Bangor High School.
At BHS, the 10-12 members of longstanding sustainability club Students Ending Environmental Destruction (SEED) were trying to build a community too. To grow the club, they wanted to host educational events that could benefit the whole school and the environment, faculty adviser Chris Packard said. He knew the chapter president, so they planned a chestnut event.
Students worked with the city forester and campus grounds manager, learned how to avoid buried cables when digging and evaluated growing conditions across campus as they planned. A few visited a chestnut research facility and got to try inoculating seedlings.
In the spring, 60 students showed up for a talk with chapter president Mark McCollough and an American chestnut movie screening.
They had chestnut refreshments — students were neutral about the plain nuts, but librarian Nancy Watson’s chestnut blondies were a hit — and, after the film, planted six saplings in front of the school’s main administrative entrance, where students often gather.
The new trees, sourced from a student nursery at another Maine high school, replace ones knocked over by recent storms.
While most schoolwork stays within the building, the chestnut project reached outside of it, and not just literally, Packard said. SEED members were excited about that and it showed other students they were making an impact.
Members grew to care about the trees, had fun calling each other “chestnutters” and were eager to check on the grove when they returned in the fall.
That’s the kind of energy Butler said is necessary for chestnut revival efforts to keep going. She’s confident breeding programs will produce longer term successes, but it’s hard to say when, and devoted volunteers are getting older.
She also believes partnering with schools is an important effort to connect young people to the outdoors and to plants in a way they wouldn’t experience otherwise.
At BHS, students will keep an eye on the grove over the years. The project seeks volunteer caretakers or “chestnut stewards” for each planting to monitor them and report on their health, Butler said.
Finding volunteers is a potential challenge, but chestnuts don’t take a lot of work in such small plantings. There’s also just something about the tree that attracts people, she said.
In 10 to 15 years, most of the American chestnuts that went into the ground this year will die. As they mature, their bark begins to crack and blight spores can get in. But first they’ll hopefully live to produce nuts, to flower and be pollinated with others, building up resistance over time.
“Success isn’t that they stay alive forever,” Butler said. “It’s just that we get to watch what they do.”
People can buy seedlings to plant at home from Viles Arboretum in Augusta or Ellis’ Nursery and Greenhouse in Hudson. Sign up for a mailing list about spring seedling sales on the chapter’s website.
