On Friday I helped transplant about 100 chestnut seedlings on a farm in a rather remote area of Unicoi County, TN, which is just north of Asheville on modern Interstate 26, but in the old days this was really backwoods country. The field was only 32 miles from my house in Asheville -- almost all by interstate highway now. So this was a much easier drive for me than for any member of the Tennessee chapter.

This is land long owned by the Tilson family, and it's just off Tilson Mountain Road.

And it's got a neat story behind it that connects backwoods Tennessee with New England.

John Quillin Tilson of this family managed to enroll at Yale University in the late 1800's, and wound up as Majority Leader of the US House of Representatives as a Congressman from Connecticut. He retired to New Hampshire, where his descendants still live, but he requested to be buried back on the family farm in the mountains of Tennessee. Here's his biography on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Q._Tilson

One of his descendants, an elderly lady from New Hampshire, drove all the way down to North Carolina to attend the Chestnut Saturday event at Cataloochee Ranch last fall, where she got to see the beautiful chestnut orchard there. And she asked her sons to plant a chestnut orchard on the family farm in Tennessee.

So my helpers in the planting were all from New England -- two from New Hampshire and two from Maine! In the attached photo, Ken (far left) and John (far right) Murray are the New Hampshire guys, and Ryan Hawkins and his grandmother Kay in the middle are from Hartford, Maine. Ryan is finishing college in Portland, ME, and Kay grew up on a dairy farm there. Ryan and Kay's "Down East" accents were very strong to my southern ears.

And then, to add to the fun, the caretaker of the farm showed up with his kids -- all with equally strong East Tennessee accents (example: a chicken lays "aigs" in East Tennessee!)

It makes for a good chestnut story.

Paul