While flipping through Charles Kuralt's America, I found this interesting passage on the doomed American chestnut tree:
And standing beside the stone steps that led up to the door was a single, doomed chestnut tree. All American chestnut trees are doomed. This one was about twelve feet tall, the size when they are afflicted by the chestnut blight, and this one was---covered with scale on the trunk and rotting at the junction of the branches. Chestnuts are the great arboreal tragedy of America. In the nineteenth century, they blanketed the land and amounted to about one-fourth of all the trees in the southern Appalachians. They grew a hundred feet tall and lived five hundred years or more. They provided a lively timber business, food for settlers and animals, and shade for many a dwelling. (Remember that it was "under the spreading chestnut tree" that the village smithy stood.)
The blight struck in 1904, and in the next half century killed virtually every chestnut tree in the United States. Researchers have been at work for years in Maryland, Virginia, and elsewhere, trying to breed a blight-resistant chestnut. I hope they succeed someday. It would be wonderful to think of our grandchildren roaming through the woods as our grandparents did, coming home with a hatful of chestnuts.