Written by Bill Adamsen
CT Chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation
Yesterday a most unusual and welcome gift arrived in the mail. A micro-thin slice of American chestnut embedded between thin panels in a sandwich of glass, and described by its sender as a Magic Lantern slide.
PBS has put out a series, Appalachia: A History of Mountains and People, which features American chestnut in the final segment. This segment, Power and Place, is airing this weekend, though from what I found, at some inopportune times. Thought members might be interested. Seems odd that it's not airing in prime time (most PBS stations are), so you may want to double check the local schedules.
Kendra Gurney
New England Regional Science Coordinator - TACF
USFS Northern Research Station
705 Spear Street
South Burlington, VT 05403
Tel: 802.951.6771 x1350 Fax: 802.951.6368
Cell: 802.999.8706
Kendra@acf.org or kgurney@uvm.edu
By Bill Adamsen
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While visiting the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, I was thrilled to see their exhibit of a large dugout canoe carved from solid American chestnut. I was visiting the museum with my daughter and her friends and was stunned by this canoe's appearance. A full eighteen feet long, it was built from solid chestnut and the grain of the mammoth tree is still clearly visible. |
| Found at the bottom of West Hill Pond in northwestern Connecticut by divers in 1988, the canoe had been deliberately sunk in about 12 feet of water using rocks, perhaps to ensure it remained below the ice of the lake during the winter. West Hill Pond is located at 900+ feet elevation and ice thickness frequently reaches eighteen to twenty four inches. The pond itself bottoms out at about 65 feet - deep for lakes in Connecticut. The actual depth at time of sinking may have been perhaps four to five less, since that is the depth of the impoundment caused by the West Hill Pond dam. The divers turned the eighteen foot long canoe over to Yale University's Peabody Museum - who in turn donated the canoe to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in 1996 for conservation and display. More can be found at the Norwich Bulletin or at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. |
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Apparently American chestnut dugouts were not uncommon on freshwater lakes in CT. The Connecticut State Museum also has a an example of a dugout canoe discovered during the draining of a lake in Bethel, CT back in 1911. That canoe is also estimated to be from the 16th or 17th century. The article goes on to note that all the dugout canoes found in New England have been found underwater or at the bottom of lakes where the cold water enhances preservation and inaccessibility hinders destructive access. Chestnut would have been a preferred material for building a dugout. The wood has a high tannic acid content which makes it resistant to decay. The trees were common, grew close to the water, and the tall straight (branchless) trunks would all have made them suitable and preferred for a canoe. As one of the lightest of the hardwoods and one of the easiest to work, it would have been a natural choice of a dugout canoe builder. |
| Those with an interest in seeing a dugout built or in use, there are a series of educational videos produced by Gatehouse Media depicting the manufacture and use of dugout canoes called mishoonash by the Wampanoag. These are vitally important documentaries and I'm delighted they're available through YouTube |  |
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West Hill Pond, location of the discovery of the Pequot canoe is familiar to me, having grown up playing in its woods and on its waters. I was surprised to have never heard of this discovery. I can understand someone wanting a canoe on the lake. The waters are extremely clear both as a result of an extremely small watershed, and unique limnology which provides a strong basic buffering potential. Even today one can see the bottom at ten feet or more with excellent underwater visibility. The Pond sports two Boy Scout Camps (Camp Sequassen and Camp Workcoeman) with beautiful facilities. Today's scouts can't wait until summer to ply its waters in their own canoes. My grandmother had a log cabin of American chestnut built on West Hill Pond shortly after the blight, and our property has many American chestnut sprouts growing and even flowering right along the shore. Perhaps one of them was the "source" of the material for this canoe? |
There are certain routes I frequently drive in Connecticut based on certain chores or repetitive tasks ... meetings, work, chauffering kids to their sports. One frequent drive is up Route 8 from Bridgeport to Winsted.
I was a little shocked last weekend while making the drive to see (and smell) the brilliant and pungent flowers of a stand of chestnut along the highway. I'd driven the route hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and never seen these trees. Wanting to examine more closely, I pulled off at the next exit, turned around and took a closer look.
Trees have a special meaning for people; trees are providers of food, inspiration and materials for art and architecture, as well as providers of renewable fuel. Trees are not only symbolic of our relationship with nature, but symbolic of our reliance on nature for existence. Perhaps for this reason man holds trees in a special place in his heart and trees of record size become a symbol ... a touchstone of the present that links to our past and future. Connecticut College maintains the database of Notable Trees for the state of Connecticut. And this resource can provide hours of fun in researching and discovering trees of great variety and unimaginable dimension within minutes or hours of home.
By James Egenrieder
[reprinted with permission]
There was a short but very interesting interview on NPR (public radio) on November 8, 2005 that quickly caught my attention. This interview was part of the daily All Things Considered program; the interviewee was botanist Erik Nilsen and the interviewer was John Nielson. The interview was titled Autumn Leaves: Pretty or Poisonous? What surprised me was Nilsen, while discussing allelopathic qualities of colorful autumn leaves, which he studies at Virginia Tech, stated But it may be the tree that was the master of this strategy is one that’s not even around anymore. It was called the American chestnut, and it was wiped out by an exotic fungus in the early 1900’s. Nilsen says the leaves that fell from chestnut trees were exceptionally potent, which is partly why they once completely dominated the forest in southern Appalachia.
