Before the turn of the century, and even before chestnut blight had
swept through our eastern forests, destroying one of our most valuable
commercial timber trees, European and Asiatic chestnuts had been
introduced. They made variable growth in the Gulf States, along the
eastern seaboard from Florida to southern Maine, the southern half of
Pennsylvania, southwestern Michigan, southeastern Iowa, down the
Mississippi River Valley and on the Pacific Coast. These trees were
grown for horticultural purposes, and for the most part, represented
large-fruited varieties of Japanese chestnuts. They were not regarded as
having forest-tree possibilities for in the open situations in which
they were usually planted to insure early fruiting, the trees developed
low-spreading crowns, resembling orchard trees. However, after the
blight became fully established and it became apparent that our American
chestnut was doomed, and that these scattered Asiatic chestnut trees had
a natural resistance to this disease, a new interest developed in the
Asiatic chestnuts as a possible substitute for the American chestnut.
The interest in and need for resistant, forest-type chestnuts became so
great that the U. S. Department of Agriculture imported from the Orient
seed of strains that might be suitable for the production of timber,
poles and posts, with tannin and nuts as valuable by-products--qualities
inherent in our native chestnut. The Division of Forest Pathology,
Bureau of Plant Industry, Soils, and Agricultural Engineering has been
carrying on the project of testing Asiatic chestnuts as timber trees.
Professor R. Kent Beattie of this Division was in China, Korea, and
Japan from 1927 to 1930, and collected over 250 bushels of seed for
shipment to this Division. The seeds represented four species: Castanea
mollissima--the Chinese chestnut; C. henryi--the Henry chinkapin; C.
seguinii--the Seguin chestnut; and C. crenata--the Japanese chestnut.