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Chestnuts and Plott Dogs
Entered by: Steve Fielder
1/1/2005 9:31:53 AM
Introduction by Steve Fielder
Octogenarians like Homon Fielder, now 85 years of age well remember the mighty chestnut trees that were the proud sentinels of the southern Appalachian forests at the turn of the century. No doubt, many bear tracks were started beneath their spreading umbrellas and many a mountain bruin was dispatched from their limbs as the baying pack waited below.
Homon remembers many tales of hunting in the chestnut woods of his youth. I too remember the rambling fences of chestnut rails along the southern West Virginia ridges and treeing game in chestnut snags when just a boy.
My good friend Wendall Bond of Christiansburg, Virginia shares this interesting story at Christmas - 2004. As you read, imagine hunting bear in this region with a pack of Plotts when the mighty chestnut was king.
"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..."
Patrick man publishes article on chestnut trade
By Nancy Lindsey
"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..."
The words of the classic holiday tune conjure up romantic images of fireplaces hung with children's stockings and vendors selling roasted chestnuts on street corners in big cities.
Part of the reality behind those images--the chestnuts grown in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the 19th and early 20th centuries--originated in Patrick County.
"Like Manna from God: The American Chestnut Trade in Southwestern Virginia," an article by Ralph H. Lutts in Environmental History magazine, traces the rise and fall of the American chestnut tree and how important its trade was to the local economies and lifestyles of this region.
"The year 2004 marks the centennial of the chestnut blight and the onset of the greatest ecological disaster to strike the forests of North America in historical times," writes Lutts, a resident of Meadows of Dan. "In less than fifty years the blight wiped out a dominant tree of the eastern forest, the American chestnut (Castanea dentata). The disease killed an estimated 3.5 billion trees, the equivalent of over 9 million acres of pure chestnut stand. The disappearance of the chestnut led to the collapse of wildlife populations that were dependent upon its nuts as a food source, including bear, squirrel, and turkey. The replacement of the chestnut by other tree species led to the restructuring of forest communities...
"The loss of the American chestnut was a tragedy for poor mountain residents in the southern Appalachian region. The nuts were a vital source of food for their families, autumn forage for their animals, and a commodity for barter and sale. Many people relied upon the seasonal crop of nuts and the natural abundance that they represented. As one mountaineer put it, 'chestnuts were like the manna that God sent to feed the Israelites.' A mountain woman remarked, 'A grove of chestnuts is a better provider than a man--easier to have around, too.'"
The article focuses on the period of 1900-1930 and the five southwestern Virginia Blue Ridge counties of Franklin, Floyd, Patrick, Carroll, and Grayson.
"At the beginning of the twentieth century," Lutts writes, "the American chestnut ranged from southern Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont southward along the Appalachian Mountains to Georgia and Alabama...In the Southern Appalachians the tree often reached 120 feet in height and 7 feet in diameter...Common at altitudes above 2,000 feet, chestnuts grew best in moist hollows above 3,000 feet."
Lutts quotes oral histories, memoirs and other writers, such as this description of a view from a mountaintop in the Great Smoky Mountains from nature writer Donald Peattie: "the great forest below waving with creamy white chestnut blossoms in the crowns of the ancient trees, so that it looks like a sea of white combers plowing across its surface."
Lutts cites people's memories about picking up chestnuts as children and selling them at the local general store for shoes, clothes and schoolbooks. Many people recalled that they had to get up early in the morning to beat the wild hogs and turkeys to the chestnuts.
The article is also full of references to the chestnut trade in Patrick County, which was in 1910 the largest exporter of chestnuts in the state of Virginia.
"Country store record books provide much more accurate information, but they are difficult to find, especially day books," writes Lutts. "Records of hucksters' business and personal shipments are virtually nonexistent. There are, though, other clues. A set of Mayberry General Store shipping receipts from the Southern Express Company provide revealing details of one business.
"The store, which is located in the Patrick County Blue Ridge community of Mayberry, near the border of Floyd and Carroll counties, shipped its nuts through Stuart. ...The store shipped at least 9,156 pounds of nuts in 1914, and another 6,560 pounds in 1915, with a total estimated wholesale sale of $872, or about six cents per pound...Although some nuts went to wholesalers in Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia, most went to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.
"The local trade of chestnuts linked even the poorest folks, who seldom if ever used cash, to the national economy despite the often encountered myth that these mountain people lived in isolation. The roasted chestnuts sold by vendors on the streets of New York, or stuffed into turkeys in urban and suburban areas throughout the northeast, may have been gathered by poor children and adults in the Blue Ridge of Southwestern Virginia."
Lutts writes about the Danville and Western railroad, "affectionately called the 'Dick and Willie' by county residents," which reached Patrick County in 1884 and "expanded economic opportunities for the county and especially for the chestnut trade."
"The son of a station master recalls that he best money his father made was from shipping chestnuts," Lutts writes. "His father told him that, 'during the harvest time of chestnuts you could hardly find a place to put the bags of chestnuts down, because everyone was a chestnut dealer, just about. They harvested the chestnuts and brought them and shipped them to the big cities.'"
Lutts records that The Enterprise reported in October 1915, "About thirty wagon loads of chestnuts were brought to Stuart from the Meadows of Dan Saturday and Monday for shipment. The D. & W. Ry. has been taking away a car of chestnuts every day for some time."
"That was a lot of chestnuts," Lutts writes, especially when we realize that the nuts arriving from Meadows of Dan and other Blue Ridge communities often were hauled in horse-drawn Conestoga wagons capable of carrying about two thousand pounds each. Even if the average wagon load was half that amount, this adds up to about 30,000 pounds of nuts shipped in two days."
Lutts cites the U.S. Agricultural Census figures for 1910 showing that "Grayson, Carroll, Patrick, Floyd and Franklin counties produced 360,384 pounds of nuts...This amounted to 43 percent of the entire production of all nuts in Virginia that year. Patrick County produced more nuts than any other county in the state."
The vast majority of the nuts shipped from this region were chestnuts, with perhaps limited quantities of chinquapins and walnuts, Lutts writes.
"This conclusion is supported by the fact that twenty years later, after the ravages of the chestnut blight, these five counties together produced a mere 640 pounds of nuts, including only 170 pounds of chestnuts."
"Memories of the chestnut loom large for many elderly residents of southern Appalachia," Lutts writes. "They remember it fondly and mourn its loss. These feelings of loss also may encompass the loss of a way of life that the chestnut has come to symbolize...
"With the death of the trees and the bust of the chestnut trade in the late 1920s, the nuts became a memory recalled with a fondness that belies the great labor involved in collecting them and hauling them to the railroad. It is, though, a memory of abundance--of manna dropped from the forest canopy."
Lutts is a member of the Goddard College faculty, where he coordinates an M.A. concentration in interdisciplinary environmental studies. He is author of The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and Sentiment and editor of The Wild Animal Story.
For more information about American Chestnut trees, try these links:
http://www.acf.org/Chestnut_history.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut
http://forestry.about.com/cs/treeid/a/achestnut.htm
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Last Updated by: Mike Phillips
2/13/2007 10:10:14 AM
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