About 10 years ago in 2012 Beaver Brook Association (BBA) entered into a partnership with The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) to create and maintain the first large-scale test planting of potentially blight-resistant American chestnuts in northern New England.

A little bit of history about the American Chestnut, less than 100 years ago eastern U.S. forests were dominated by large American chestnut trees. These trees reined over 200 million acres of eastern woodlands from Maine to northern Florida and from the Piedmont west to the Ohio valley, until succumbing to a lethal fungal disease, chestnut blight. An estimated 4 billion American chestnuts, one-quarter of the eastern hardwood tree population, grew within this range before the blight. By the 1950s the population was reduced to short-lived stump sprouts. In 1983 TACF began to use the little-known backcross breeding technique to develop American chestnuts with blight resistance characteristic of Chinese chestnuts.

We are hosting a workday to help manage the invasive plants that have grown in the orchard. We are doing this to support the continued research of the American Chestnut with hopes to hand pollinate the chestnut trees to develop blight-resistant seeds this coming summer of 2023. This event will be canceled in the case of bad weather. Please park across the street from the office in the field near the chestnut orchard.

This project is being organized and run by BBA Trustee Kim Colson please contact her with any questions. kimcolson.sebago@gmail.com.