Just over a hundred years ago, the American Chestnut tree was king of the eastern and southeastern deciduous forests. The nuts were sweet, edible, nutritious, and abundant. The wood was versatile, hard, durable, and easy to work with. These trees were a fast-growing hardwood, and a single mature trunk would very often provide enough wood for a small cabin.

During the first half of the 20th century, disaster struck these quintessentially American trees in the form of a fungus, accidentally imported from overseas. Chestnut blight raged through the American Chestnut population, damaging and killing trees rapidly. Unfortunately, many landowners didn't help, in spite of their best intentions; they systematically and methodically cut down all the American Chestnut trees they could identify, in an attempt to control the spread of the blight.

For a number of years, it was thought this magnificent tree was extinct. There are still millions of sprouts, but very few survive long enough to mature into nut-producing trees. The American Chestnut Foundation was started in the 1980s by scientists and growers interested in preserving the original species, as well as developing a blight-resistant strain of the American Chestnut Tree.

If you're interested in helping, there's a lot you can do, from donating money, growing seedlings, or helping identify the very rare surviving American Chestnut trees.