American Chestnut Cooperators' Foundation Blight Fungus

Chestnut blight is caused by a fungus which entered our country on Asian nursery stock imported to New York around 1900. Spread by wind, rain, birds and other animals, it enters through cracks or wounds in the bark, multiplies rapidly, making sunken cankers which expand and girdle the stem, killing everything above the canker, usually in one growing season. Because it had never before been exposed to this fungus, the American chestnut was highly susceptible; like the native American tribes exposed to smallpox, the American chestnut was devastated throughout the natural range, extending over the Appalachian hills and highlands from Maine to Georgia. By 1940, three and a half billion American chestnuts had perished.

All information on this site was written &/or approved by Lucille & Gary Griffin and John Rush Elkins, respectively, Executive Director, American Chestnut Cooperators' Foundation, Professor of Forest Pathology at Virginia Tech, and Research Chemist & Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Concord College, West Virginia. You are welcome to copy everything printed on this site for your information. Please credit anything quoted for publication to The American Chestnut Cooperators' Foundation.