The drought resistant, late blooming chestnut tree was a dependable and year-round source of food for humans, livestock and wildlife in America. Chestnut trees were once so numerous along the eastern forests of the U.S. that it is said a squirrel could jump from chestnut tree to chestnut tree all the way from Georgia to New York without ever touching the ground.
At the turn of the century, an imported "Chestnut blight" or bark fungus attacked The American chestnut trees. This blight arrived in the last 1800’s and began to infect the native trees. By the 1930’s the trees were virtually all killed or reduced to scattered shrubby sprouts.

After nearly 100 years of efforts to cure and restore the Chestnut tree, the status of the Chestnut tree in the wild has changed very little. Efforts are now being made to re-introduce a disease resistant variety of the American Chestnut Tree. Breeding of resistant American Chestnut trees and intercrossing their offspring, genetically engineering resistance genes into the American Chestnut, using hybrids or crossing American and other resistant Asian Chestnuts and a natural remedy called hypovirulence, a virus infection, slows the fungus and allows the trees to recover, are all methods currently being explored to restore the Chestnut.

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