Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/163

THE CHESTNUT 117 The native American chestnut has a delicious flavor. Very little use has been made of these nuts considering the fact that they once grew wild to the extent of millions of bushels on hun- dreds of thousands of square miles of the eastern United States. They were a source of income for the Appalachian mountaineer in many sections and for boys on farms along the fringes of the Appalachians. Looking for the beautiful brown nuts under the trees in the woods is a lure to the hunting instincts of man. Only a few million pounds were sent to American markets. These nuts were eaten along the street, at Hallowe'en parties, and beside the open fire after supper; perhaps we should not omit their service in school to alleviate for country boys the tedium of lessons. American wild chestnuts were important to the Indian, the squirrel, the opossum, and the bear; but a cen- tury and a quarter after the Declaration of Independence, they rotted by the million bushels in the forests from Vermont to Alabama. The great drawback of the American chestnut was its small size and the added disadvantage that many of them stuck fast in the bur and had to be removed by force. These disadvan- tages helped to make the Indian's corn preferable as the fron- tiersman's chief crop. For the same reason the large nuts of Europe appealed to the first experimenters with grafted chest- nut trees and chestnut orchards. Thomas Jefferson grafted some European varieties of chest- nut on his Monticello estate in 1775, but an extensive intro- duction by Irenée Du Pont de Nemours of Wilmington, Dela- ware, about the beginning of the 19th century, seems to have been responsible for their rather wide distribution by the year 1900 over southeastern Pennsylvania and the adjacent parts of Delaware and New Jersey. As early as 1893 the late Edwin Satterthwaite at Jenkintown, ten miles north of Phila- delphia, had the roadsides and fence rows of his truck farm lined with a great assortment of chestnut trees, many of which were grafted and produced nuts of many different sizes and