The Long and Winding Road: A Tale of the American Chestnut

As you near the farm, careening around the turns, there’s an honor-system farmstand (a table, really, with a basket) on the side of the road. A handwritten sign says “Thank you,” on a jar for collecting money, and the offerings are sparse—a handful of string beans and a half dozen tomatoes, some of which have succumbed to bites from critters that are not bound by the honor code.

Just up the road is the turn for Bryant Farm. As you ascend the ridge, rows of chest- nut trees, some still in their protective plastic tubes, flank the path. There’s a dilapidated log cabin tucked back among the oak and poplar trees that I later learn to be an old tobacco barn. It came with the property and, last year, housed a family of bears—mama, papa, and their cubs.

The Bryants’ home is a two-story brick house with a grand front porch, appointed with a couple of rocking chairs on either side of the entrance. Kim Bryant meets me at the door, two small dogs circling her in anticipation. Kim settles on the couch and eventually the dogs, Gemma and Apollo, join her. Her husband Dave takes a seat in the rocking chair.

Dave Bryant always knew that he would return to Nelson County. Working in Richmond and Northern Virginia as a software developer, he was as distant from a life on the land as a man could be, but the hills of his hometown never stopped calling. He ran his business for twenty-five years with Kim handling the marketing end of things. Eventually, the Internet gave them the ability to work remotely—very remotely. And out of Richmond to the woods of Nelson County went the Bryants. It was an easy decision.

“The thought was, ‘hey, in this part of Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, the terrain is different,’ Dave explains. “Our land is kind of hilly, stuck here between two mountain ranges. I’m not going to stick soybeans on it; it just won’t work for that. It has to be well-suited, so I backed up and read an article that piqued my interest on chestnuts, and I said ‘that is what was grown here throughout history, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel.’ This is actually a good fit.”

By 2009, the Bryants had cleared forty-six acres of pine trees on their new property. They had a house built and began the process of planting, by hand, 250 chestnut trees. Kim says in that first year, only ten trees survived. Chestnut-starved deer made quick work of the test planting, and the Bryants had learned their first lesson: Beware the deer.

“They love chestnuts,” says Kim. “They ate the trees, and then, when the chestnuts came out, you’d go down the line, and they’d have opened up the nut and eaten it and left the shell. It looked like they’d had a party.”

While the Bryants are all for reforestation, they want to see the development of the chestnut as an agricultural product first and foremost. Eight years in, the Bryants now have twenty-three acres of chestnut trees. They’ve learned to outwit the deer through a process of meticulous and near-constant harvesting, from early in the morning to late in the evening, throughout the roughly six-week season.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the chestnut tree was a source of livelihood from Maine to Georgia—foodstuff for wildlife and livestock, and a reliable generator of income from its good lumber. When the tree met its fungal foe in 1904, it seemed entirely possible that the mighty chestnut would be able to overcome the blight. Rather, it seemed impossible that a single spore could take down such a noble and prolific giant.

Like a plague, the blight spread, wiping out any tree in its path, some 30 million acres, until only the memories of chestnuts remained. But those memories were vivid. The trees had been an indelible part of the Appalachian landscape, part of the livelihoods of the people who lived there, and in a way, part of their families.

The Dunstan, the comeback kid of chestnut trees, was engineered by Robert Dunstan after a fellow arborist discovered a chestnut tree thriving among a grove of long dead trees. Dunstan grafted the scions of that tree onto Chinese chestnut root stock, and finally, a blight-resistant American Chestnut hybrid was born. It was the 1950s, nearly fifty years after the first sign of the blight had been reported. Many, but not all, had given up hope.

“These are people we knew had existing orchard operations, and we knew that they were crazy like we were, so we convinced them,” Dave explains. “Some of the plantings are quite small, one or two acres of underutilized land. There are thousands of these underutilized fields that are perfect for this type of operation.”

“Of course, I’d like to see Virginia have 1,000 acres in trees in the next ten years, but I don’t know that there will be enough tree stock for that, so one of the things we’re working on now is developing commercial tree stock,”

After a morning at Bryant Farm, I make my way home with five pounds of chestnuts that I’ve harvested myself. Just as one’s entrance to Bryant Farm must be carefully calculated, so too must be your entrance into your first chestnut. After freeing a nut from its alien and dangerously prickly exterior husk, you’re left with a smooth mahogany nut that provides no clue as to how to breach it. There’s no obvious point of entry, save for a small light brown patch at the base of the nut. I give it a poke with my thumbnail, and it doesn’t budge. I wonder at the thought of who first cracked this nut, who first determined that it was both edible and worth eating.

Several minutes later, I’ve worked my way into that soft beige spot with a paring knife and pried free a yellowish jewel. Eaten raw, it’s starchy, potato-like, with the faintest nuttiness. It’s surprisingly satisfying—the act itself and the reward—and I realize now how such an impenetrable-seeming nut could have ever risen to such prominence: It’s good, and it’s worth the effort.