Ivan Booker remembers fields dotted with round, shiny nuts and prickly burrs. He was 8 years old then and the path to school through the Gifford Farm in North Fairfield was full of towering chestnut trees.
"My brother and I would fill our pockets with sweet chestnuts and munch on them all day," Booker recalled.
It was 1918.
Fourteen years later, the trees had disappeared from the Gifford Farm. "They were all dead," said Booker, now 96.
Growing more than 100 feet tall and 10 feet thick, American chestnut trees were the giants of the Northeast, stretching their enormous limbs over 500,000 square miles from Maine to Mississippi.
"It was the king of the forest," said Jay Lindsey, a member of the American Chestnut Foundation. He manages a 5-acre breeding site at the University of Maine's Highmoor Farm in Monmouth, one of 10 Maine sites where scientists are working to re-establish chestnut trees.
The trees could grow in almost any type of soil, Lindsey said, and the wood was very popular with carpenters. It was also critically important to the economic prosperity of the Appalachian region, where chestnut crowns covered 40 to 50 percent of the forest canopy.
But then the giants fell, brought down at the turn of the 20th century by a canker-causing fungus brought from overseas on imported Chinese chestnut trees. Biologists worked from the 1930s to the 1960s, breeding the remaining chestnut trees in hopes that the strongest could withstand the fungal blight. But after repeated failures, those efforts were all but abandoned.
Then, in 1981, a Minnesota plant geneticist named Charles Burnham proposed that the Chinese chestnut tree that brought the demise of the American chestnuts could be used to resurrect them by cross-breeding the two species.
Normally, the breeding process takes more than 36 years.
But Maine is benefiting from Virginia seeds, which have spent years undergoing the breeding process.
"It kind of allows us to leapfrog about three generations," said Glen Rea, president of the foundation's Maine chapter.
Evans thinks it may take only 12 years before a generation of American chestnuts reaches a success point, when the seeds are guaranteed to grow into fully resistant trees that can be introduced back into the wild. Breeding sites in Pennsylvania and Virginia are just a few years away from success, he said, and will soon be planting their first seed orchards - trees that should give birth to the final generation of resistant saplings.
The American Chestnut Foundation was founded in 1983 to coordinate breeding programs that began in Meadowview, Va. In 1998, the Maine chapter was created, and the following year the state's first breeding program began at Merryspring Park in Camden.
The other eight Maine breeding sites are in Bradley, China, Hope, Lovell, Morrill, Union, Unity and Veazie.
At this point, the biggest concern for the nearly 250 members of the foundation's Maine chapter is getting enough volunteers to help breed trees, and to find additional native trees whose seeds can be used in the process.
"It's a worthwhile project," Rea said. "These are beautiful trees."Portland Press Herald
