After being wiped out by a blight, the American chestnut tree is making a comeback right at West Virginia University’s Davis College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Mark Double, a former WVU Davis College professor, and Amy Metheny, a research assistant at the Davis College, are both proud members of the West Virginia chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation and are helping lead the restoration effort.
Double, who has spent 41 years working on bringing the American chestnut back to West Virginia, has watched the effort grow from an idea to a statewide restoration project, thanks to support from researchers, volunteers and the community.
Before the chestnut blight swept through eastern forests in the early 1900s, the American chestnut was one of the most common and important trees in Appalachia.
“It was an extremely important tree,” Double said. “You built your house out of chestnut, you roofed your house with chestnut, you used chestnut rail fence to pen in animals, and you fed the nuts to your hogs.”
This tree was so widely used by the people of Appalachia that it became known as the “cradle to grave tree.”
“You were likely to lay in a cradle made of American chestnut and a coffin made of American chestnut,” Metheny said. “It was that common.”
That history was lost when chestnut blight spread across the eastern United States, killing billions of trees during the span of just a few decades.
Today, members of the West Virginia chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation are working to preserve the genetics of the species while helping develop future generations of trees capable of surviving in West Virginia forests.
At WVU’s Evansdale Greenhouse, chestnuts collected by volunteers around the state are grown into seedlings and then given out to members of the American Chestnut Foundation to distribute for planting. The seedlings are planted in conservation orchards that help preserve West Virginia’s native chestnut genetics while supporting ongoing breeding efforts.
The process relies heavily on volunteers who help locate surviving chestnut trees, collect nuts, help with planting and monitoring the growing trees.
“We love citizen scientists. They are the ones collecting these nuts for us and helping us look for trees and helping us check on our trees,” Metheny said.
For Metheny, the project is about more than just research. As a West Virginia native and Davis College alum, she got involved with chestnut restoration in West Virginia as a student and is now continuing that work in her career.
“It’s a big part of our heritage,” Metheny said. “We’re the only state that’s completely within the range of the American chestnut and completely within the range of Appalachia.”
The connection to West Virginia is one reason researchers continue to be committed to the restoration effort more than a century after the blight first appeared. For Metheny, the tree represents something more than restoration alone.
“It’s a beautiful symbol of resilience,” Metheny said. “This tree really should have been wiped out a hundred years ago, but because the root systems are so powerful, they’re able to continuously send up shoots year after year.”
For many West Virginians, that persistence reflects the same determination that has kept efforts to restore the species moving forward for decades.
