CHESTNUT MEMORIES ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Chestnut Memories Oral History Transcript
Bethany BAXTER
Interviewer: Bethany Baxter
Interviewee: Wallace Coffey
Interview Location: Bristol, Tennessee
Interview Date: June 1 st , 2008
Transcriber: Bethany Baxter
Audio File: WallaceCoffey,5.1.08.WAV
BB: So I have to explain to you what’s happening, ok so, the key objective of this interview is to serve as a research tool to document memories of the American chestnut in the southern Appalachian region. Information attained in these interviews will be retained and made available for future use in efforts to promote a better understanding of the role of American chestnut in Appalachian culture. Have you signed the participant identification and release agreements?
WC: yes I sure did.
BB: ok great. So you want to start out, tell me your name, when you were born, where you grew up, background information, where you went to school, what you did
WC: Well this is June the first, 2008, it’s about 5:22 pm, and I’m sitting in the comfortable confines of one of my most favorite restaurants the Mad Greek in Bristol, Tennessee, which is my home town where I’ve been all my life, I never ever went away to the military. Sitting here with me is my wife is here with me, Carolyn, we’ve been married about 45 years, 46. How long is it?
CC: 42 years
WC: 42, see too long. So she’s here with Bethany and myself. I’m a native here, I’ve had a natural history interest ever since I was a child. I’ve always loved the outdoors. I grew up with a father who was quite an outdoors person, he always did a lot of fishing and things like that, and I had to be one of the children that went along on that sort of thing. He always had a great deal of respect for the changing of our landscape with the coming of the Tennessee Valley Authority and construction of TVA lakes. We would go out when I was a child and watch them build the dams here, the big lakes, he was always interpreting that to us. So in my family there is a sense of appreciating those thing, but also I have an older brother who’s a triple professor at John Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore Maryland, and he is past president of the American Cancer Research Association, he’s on the Whitehouse Committee for Cancer Research appointed by Bush to a 6 year term. He’s 8 years older than I am, so I grew up with a brother who’s very technically minded. All of us, he’s a biologist, he’s a cancer researcher, so we all have a technical look at everything we do. I’m a real people person, that’s a term Ken Dubke in Chattanooga, Tennessee gave me, talking about himself, he was with the National Park Service, he said we are people persons, that’s something I’ve always valued. I’m a lifetime mentor of young people and I probably have 4 if not 5 young people who I met in the early 20s or teenagers who have their PhDs, and I still have one on the way. A young person at Austin P State University who got an undergraduate assistantship even when he was in high school, he got an undergraduate assistantship with them He got funded by East Tennessee State University for biological research, the biology department chose him, so you can imagine what kind of people I’m dealing with. Anyhow, I spent a lot of time communicating with people on the faculty around. I’ve studied plants, I’ve collected ferns, studied ferns, I have in the university herbariums around, I’ve done work with the North Carolina, with the New York Botanical gardens, I’ve taught field trips and summer classes at Roan Mountain for the University of North Carolina. So, I have a broad interest that’s a little bit closer to academia because of that background. My father died when I was a senior in high school so I had to set out for an education on my own. So I worked and went to school and I started in television in 1960s, worked 10 years with an NBC affiliate and worked 31 years with the Bristol Harold Currier, which is now a media general newspaper, so I worked with that newspaper, did everything, I wrote, very much an environmental writer in 1970s. Traveled everywhere in doing that, I had many friends who wrote significant things, authors. Marsh Brooks, who wrote the Appalachians, from the school of forestry fishery and wildlife at West Virginia, was a very dear close friend of mine, I spent a lot of time with him. And so I have an extensive library of natural history nuts and I have always collected the best materials and stayed in touch with the general developments of forestry and that sort of thing, I have a number of friends in government jobs, some younger and some older. In 1964 I was offered the opportunity to be the first ever naturalist on Cherokee National Forest, so I worked in the north zone of the Cherokee, worked out of Elizabethton on what was known as the Watauga Ranger District, and that was the counties of Carter, Sullivan, and Johnson. I’ve had a life long interest in birds since I was a teenager, at about 21 years of age I became a bander with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Did that for 44 years and was editor of the Tennessee Journal of Ornithology, and was on and off that editorial staff for almost 40 years. So I’ve worked a lot in my field of research with birds with the United States National Museum, served on advisory committees, school forestry, Fish and Wildlife at Virginia Tech, so that’s sort of my background.
BB: that’s great. Do you have any firsts hand memories of seeing a chestnut or anything that you experienced yourself?
WC: my most memorable involvement with the chestnut was after it was long gone. That was in the spring or summer of 1970 and I’ve studied reptiles and amphibians along the way, salamanders were an area of great interest to me. I became interested in salamanders with Dr. Jerry Nagel who was on the faculty at East Tennessee State, and just going out on field trips. One of the species that we were greatly interested in was a species called Yonahlossee Salamander, Plethadon Yonahlossee, and it was found at the base of Grandfather Mountain, I guess back in the 20s or 30s, and he named it for the road they found it on called the Yonahlossee road. So we were looking for that salamander in this area and it was pretty scarce and there was not much known about it. As a matter of fact Dr. Tom Laughlin at East Tennessee State University now has a grant to research that species, and I’m helping him get together information about historic sites in western Carolina for the Carolina Museum of Natural History in Raleigh and things like that. So anyway, looking for the Yonahlossee, there were no known records of it Sullivan County, there may not have been any in Johnson County. There were a lot of people looking for that salamander, I found them on Holston Mountain in Sullivan County, and I remembered that Tennessee Tech, one of their faculty members Dr. Ray Jordan, he came up very quickly and we went up collected there and a guy from the faculty at the University of Missouri came up and we collected more. Went out and we were hiking just north of McQueen’s Knob near the Maple Spur fire trail, Appalachian Trail lean to is there, where you can camp out. We were going up there, 2 way radio, young guy named Tim Hawk was with me, Tim called me on the radio, he said Wallace, he was a high school student, he said I swear to got I just saw a Yonahlossee salamander and I said ‘oh really, did you catch it’, and he said ‘no it got away from me, it got away down a hole’ and I said ‘you’re kidding me’, and he said ‘no, it got away from me but I swear to god, take my word’. I said ok, keep looking. A few minutes later I turned over a log on the other side of the trail and there was a Yonahlossee salamander and I grabbed it real quick with my hand, I looked at that and I was so shocked, and I called him on the radio and I said Tim, I just found one, and he said did you see it? And I said I caught it with my hand. So the next few days a young fellow who was an undergraduate student at East Tennessee State came up and his name was Charlie Smith. Charlie Smith was one of the kids I mentored, since he was a teenager, about 13, and he was about a Senior at East Tennessee State. He is now on the faculty of the school of natural resources at Cornell University, about ready to retire. But he came up and a couple other students, and he did an undergraduate science study of the distribution of Yonahlossee salamander in Northeast Tennessee over about a 3 or 4 county area, and described rather well that habitat up there. And what we found was the top of that ridge there was covered with logs of decaying chestnut. And it kind of made an impression on us that the whenever you looked inside these chestnut logs, the color of the decaying logs was almost the color of the stripe of the base color of this salamander. Now this wasn’t anything to do with anything we knew to be scientific fact of anything like that, it’s just something that struck us. The Yonahlossee is probably the most gorgeous salamander in the entire southern Appalachian Mountains. So over a day or maybe two days at the most we captured 50 of those salamanders up there, and we did that by breaking apart the decaying logs that were up there, and by rolling over all kinds of chestnut logs that were laying on the forest floor there, and finding them underneath, and we quickly attached the Yonahlossee salamander to decaying chestnut logs. Now that may have been more widespread than we realized. We don’t see that salamander quite as often in these areas as we once saw it. We used to be able to just go out and get them anywhere like that. Now, maybe 10 years ago I went back up to that site, and I went out there and looked around, and of course the whole forest had changed. This is every bit of 30 years later. And since the forest has changed the logs are gone, they’ve finally decayed and gone away, there was a heavy herbaceous growth all in around these logs, a lot of stinging nettle and that you know, and we had to be careful to watch for snakes because the understory herbaceous growth there was up to almost, above your knees. And now that was pretty well gone. So the habitat didn’t look the same. Turned over a number of smaller more oak type logs in there and we found none of the salamanders. I still see one or two every now and then, but to think that we had a place where we found 50 of them, they were all under those chestnut logs, is very significant to us.
First kind of got tuned into the chestnut because when I was in east Tennessee state university in the early 60s I took some courses in biology there. One of the fellows was an older fellow on the faculty there, his name was Dr. Frank Barkley. Dr. Barkley was always kind of amazing to us because here he was at an age where we though he probably should be near retirement, and we was just getting his PhD. And, he was driving back and forth to Knoxville, Tennessee to do some of the final work on his PhD just a year or two before we got there, and he did his PhD in 1957. And he did his research on the natural vegetation of Johnson County, Tennessee, and that thesis was done through the biology department, and he spent a lot of years at it. He was a fellow that would take time in class to get off on tangents on things about his memories of what he’d done and what he knew about, and he talked about several plants that you could look for. I remember, like, the pitcher plant was one that he just, you know almost made you feel like you’d discovered a president of the United States who’d once served but is not in the history books if you ever saw those plants. And so it was a big deal to us when we found pitcher plants, there’s not many in Tennessee but we found lots in Virginia. So anyhow, what happened was he talked to us in class about the chestnuts? And the main thing in 1956, 1957, about that time he would drive through Shady Valley in Johnson County which is part of the Blue Ridge mountain range. It is not a part of the Blue Ridge that is famous to us like all up in Virginia through the Blue Ridge parkway, or over in western Carolina Blue Ridge, that’s the Blue Ridge chain of the Blue Ridge. The Great Smoky Mountains and Roan Mountain are part of the Unaka chain of the Blue Ridge. So Shady Valley is about the western most area of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Appalachians. So in that area there he would drive through, and he could see all the dead trees standing everywhere. So if you’ve ever driven along the Grandfather Mountain area, and some of the other Blue Ridge parkway high elevation ridges you can see a lot of the dead spruce trees and things that died from the balsam wooly aphid. Now we’re being threatened by the Hemlock Wooly adelgid, so I’ve seen some of these problems come along in my lifetime, so in his lifetime, while he was doing his graduate work, this guy’s like 50 or 60 years old, he was seeing these all these grey trees standing everywhere in the forest through there, from where the chestnut tree died off.
A guy who was teaching in the Biology department about that time was Dr. Herman Odell, and he was another member of the botanists on the faculty. He got killed just down the road here while I was going to school there. He was going home one evening and wrecked his car and it killed him, not far from where we are now and it killed him. I didn’t get to know him very well but I was in the department for about a year while he was there, and Dr. Odell back in the 30s was able to go up in those areas and collect chestnuts by the bushels everywhere, and TVA foresters and Dr. Odell and others in the region have sort of suggested that the chestnut blight didn’t really hit us in this area until about 1930. It was a little earlier in other areas and I suspect those areas more north. Dr. Barkley wrote in his dissertation that these trees grew up at an elevation to probably be about the mid 3,000 ft. range. Shady Valley is about 2800 ft. elevation. If you go down towards Damascus Virginia to the north toward that big cove hardwood there, leading through what is now the Cherokee National Forest, there were some coves n there that were under the 3000 feet level that had big deep coves that went back in the mountains and had enormous stands of chestnut in them. There were chestnut stands down in there that easily covered 2,000 acres. The trees grew from 3 to 5 feet in diameter around this area, but in the books they say up to7 feet. They grow as high as 120 feet, I’ve read a lot of that, so these were pretty good-sized trees. So the chestnut stands all this, was not long before the blight, if not about the time the blight really started was on private land. The US Forest Service had not been created. So, there was estimates up to as high as 60% of trees in forest had places of chestnut, now this wasn’t overall of the forest. If you look at the southern Appalachians, we have a tendency to have a tunnel vision of the Appalachians, in our area, of being along the Appalachian Trail, otherwise along the Blue Ridge chain. But actually just over the ridge and valley here, we have the Cumberlands, which are part of the southern Appalachian, that’s part of the Alleghany Mountains, all of that’s part of the big Appalachians. Dr. Dick Peak over at Wise Virginia, he’s still over there, he just retired from teaching English a few years back from the University of Virginia Wise. Dick Peak wrote in his book on the birch (?) of the Virginia Cumberlands that is was a major environmental disaster that didn’t come until about the 1930s in the Cumberlands. I’m sure he didn’t have any real first hand experience with it, he’s about my age. But he agrees that the time of the blight being about 1930 was pretty close to about the same thing here in Northeast Tennessee
I went to work with the US Forest Service in about 1964 on that Watauga Ranger district. At that time they were selling a lot of wormy chestnut they called it. They were cutting it off of the ground. They were selling it to timber operators who would find it covered in moss, and they would find it damp and well preserved. There was quite a rage, I guess in the 1970s, for wormy chestnut. And wormy chestnut was a little bit more difficult to come by, but that wormy look was really coming in you know. The, it was a lucrative business for foresters. These are, lets say timber men, lumber people, to go into the forest, to buy these logs that they would find, tell the Forest Service where they were, what size they were, pay a certain fee for them, and get a right to go in and get them. They’d chain them up, pull them out of there, take them to the sawmill, and the wood was still very good. So, most of the wormy chestnut at that time was being used for furniture, making beds, maybe a little bit of paneling, but there wasn’t much of it used. Shady Valley School over in Johnson County was a stone school that was built by the WPA, and it was built in the mid 1930s, 36, 37, 38, right along in there.
BB: I took a picture of it and I think it might have said 1890 something
WC: not the school, because the date is up above the door.
BB: yeah you’re right, 36, you’re right.
WC: 36. And the Works Project Administration was one of those early Roosevelt type programs, social programs, where everyone was out of work on account of the depression and all, and the government created jobs. It’s a little bit like the job core is like today, but there was a lot of older people, the job core is younger, like people who, late high school age or early college age trying to get careers started and need some training. So what happened was we had a couple of job core camps around here, and there was one at Jacobs Creek out near South Holston Lake, and I suspect that is the same job core that built the Shady Valley School in, what’d you say? It was 38 on the door?
BB: 1936
WC: 36. So, in 1936 they were able to get enough wormy chestnut with ease to panel every room and all the hallways and ceiling and everything inside that building, and it still is today. And it’s still an operating school that’s in pretty good shape. Even though it’s a small school, Shady Valley is a small community and they’re so far from the nearest schools and in the mountains and everything, that’s its be really hard to bus all those little kids across those ridges in snow and everything to school. So they try to keep that school operating. So you go in there and its right impressive to go in the gym and everywhere and see the wormy chestnut just everywhere you can imagine. Id you get a chance to see the spike camp up at Cona Rock?
BB: I missed it, I might go back there tomorrow.
WC: there is a building up at Cona Rock and I don’t know when it was built, it’d probably be pretty close to that time period. The actual name of it was the Lutheran Girls School, yeah. I think it was built by a fellow named revered Gable, who was there back close to the turn of the 20 th century, I guess. He later had a son who came back there, so there were two Gables involved, and he had a daughter in law who was a community physician there, so several Gable names in there, but this is the oldest of the Gables. I think he built that school, but it may have been built by WPA, it was about that time period. It was not owned by the federal government, it was a private school, and it was kind of to educate the people in the mountains where they were having a hard time getting good schooling, it was a church school operating in the mountains, he was sort of like a missionary in the southern Appalachians, the Reverend Gable was. I knew him, he was back here to visit his son and all, maybe lived down in here, I don’t know. That building is fully covered on the outside with the bark of wormy chestnut. You ever see wormy chestnut, not wormy chestnut, but chestnut bark, its pretty obvious, it’s a heavy course grey looking bark. You know there were slabs of the bark they used to put up to make the shingles on the side of a building. I see some things similar to it in North Carolina that I have not stopped to take the time and go look, but I would not be surprised it there weren’t a number of buildings still standing in Western North Carolina that have chestnut bark sidings on them. In about 1970 the US forest service, yeah about 70, somewhere in there they US Forest Service created the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. National Recreation Areas are special designations of government land for recreational uses as one of the priorities that the congress sets aside, but you can also hunt and cut timber on it and all that. So, bureau of land management has them, all kinds of agencies have them, but the forest service has one there. About that time they bought that building and they called it the Spike Camp, was the nickname they gave for it. Spike Camp I believe was because they had young people living there and working to maintain trails and help develop the NRA, national recreation area, and so forth. They still own it. Back in the early 1970s we created a naturalist rally in that building that still runs today. One of the few naturalists rallies still going in the east United States. There were several back in that time, started the early 60s, there was one in Western Carolina, still one in Roan Mountain, very good one that started in 61. So there’s still a naturalist rally held up there, but it was held in that building for many years. Everybody used to love to come and sit in the building and listen to great naturalists come and talk form all over the country. Then the floor settled with us one night, while we were all sitting in there it dropped an inch or two. Government panicked, we never got to go back, so I don’t know what they use the building for today.
BB: that’s a great story. So people liked that it was chestnut?
WC: oh yeah, you could sit out on the porch, big veranda type place, it probably had chestnut in other places in the building, I just never took the time too look at it. Sometimes you’re in such a hurry as you go through like you don’t slow down and smell ever rose, but you realize you’re in a rose garden.
BB: tell me what your professor Barkley would have told you about chestnut in class.
WC: he was the kind of guy who mentioned that he had seen the chestnut up there, and he had written about it in his research paper and thesis. But it was not something where he taught us for 2 or 3 days about it, or even a whole lecture. As I said there were several species he used to talk about. I said earlier it was pitcher plants, it wasn’t pitcher plants, it was skunk cabbage. So little skunk cabbage that he talked to us a lot, so these little things we always watched for after he began to talk about how special they were. I got carried away when I said pitcher plants, they’re in bogs and things, but that wasn’t what he said. So, I have no greater detail than what’s in his thesis, but his thesis has a lot of pretty good material in it. I’ve got a copy I brought along to show you, and just looking here, knowing that I was going to come, I thought why should I act like I know something, be better prepared. So he writes in here that chestnut ranked 2 nd in abundance and first in frequency as a witness tree for early surveyors. So chestnuts were very recognizable trees to all the people who owned land. Witness trees were where the corner of the property would be, where fence lines would be and all that. So looking back at all the deeds to property and everything through time, you see that it was the second in abundance but most frequently referred to tree by early surveyors. He has a little table that talks about that in his thesis. He says it seems likely that it ranked, the rank of the species as a member in the original forest was as high as that sample indicated. So he went on to mention that individual stands would have 15 to 25% of the timber trees were chestnut trees. He was citing there a publication by Ayers and Ash in 1905, what that was is Ayers and Ash published for the United States government printing office, they published comments that President Roosevelt speech to congress, and that’s a rather famous book because that was HB Ayers and WW Ash, and he may have had that date wrong, because he said that book was published in 1905 and I actually had a copy given to me by Ken Dubke, he mailed it to me and it was 1902 was the actual publication date on that. So a little discrepancy there. But, title of that was Message from the President of the United Sates. That this would have been Teddy Roosevelt, and he wrote in there about the plight of the eastern forest, and about how trees were being grossly cut over, and would give pictures of tree stands in our region in Shady Valley in that book showing how heavily everything was being timbered. One thing I remember was lot of logs of white pine lying in the forest along Beaver Dam stream in Johnson County, Shady Valley. And there were pictures of those things all throughout the southern Appalachians used to illustrate the presidents speech to Congress. In there they talked about the percentages of actual chestnut that was in the area. I created a table that showed that in a book I wrote, I wrote a book called Bird Study in Shady Valley Tennessee, I wrote that with John L Shoemaker who lives there. We have a section of the book called forestlands. And some of this relies both upon Dr. Barkley’s work, as well as some help from the United States Forest Service in 1999, and also looking back to Ayers and Ashe’s book. Ayers and Ashe had a method of determining the percentage of forest in the area and they estimated that chestnut made up 15% of the forest in 1902, Barkley says that was 1905, there’s that discrepancy again. But they indicated that 15% of the timber trees reported on what is now the Cherokee National Forest lands, were chestnut. Of course by 1999 that was 94 years later or 97 years later, there were none. So I had gone through and made comparisons of the forest types. For instance, almost all of the forest has been replaced by oak. So 20% of the trees were oak at the turn of the century and then in 1999 there was 79% according to the US Forest Service office in Unicoi County Tennessee which is over all that ranger district over there. Joe McGuiness, who’s a forester over there, is a wildlife forester, a graduate of Tennessee Tech, he’s a great friend of mine, he’s the biologist over all the north end of the Cherokee. He had all their timber people to get these figures together for me and I created this scale. So the white pines had dropped from 20% to 4%, the hemlock from15% to 1% and the others had gone from 30 to 16. So what actually happened was the oak was taking over almost everything through there after the chestnut was gone, and almost all of the other species were declining pretty fast in the percentage that they made up of the national forest.
BB: I’d like to see that table, the witness one.
WC: let’s see we’ve got a copy of this thesis in front of is. Lets see figure 4, table 6…. 5, 6, 7, 8, so we’re close…. Must be back this way… here’s the table you wanted to see, trees listed in land survey records for 111 tracks of land in Johnson County and their proposition frequency relationships. Look at that a moment.
[cut recording, recording]
BB: I’ve got it going again.
WC: Barkley wrote in that dissertation that WR Paddock, former forest service ranger for that district, reported that in Shady Valley there was very little blight on the chestnut trees, even in 1927 there was very little. Herman Odell, from the faculty at ETSU who died in 1969, I was telling you about earlier who died in a car crash, at that time he was 62 and he told Frank Barkley while they were on the faculty together, personal communication, that about gathering chestnuts literally by the bushels on Holston Mountain as late as the year of 1931. Barkley attributes Carl Thoresen of the Tennessee Valley Authority who was with their division of forestry relations, was stating that there were exceptionally fine stands of chestnut trees in Shady Valley, and on the high flats of Iron Mountain above Southerland Cove before the attack to the chestnut. Barkley notes that Lewis H Steffens, is a forest examiner, wrote in his 1917 unpublished manuscript about Shady Valley timber surveys for what is now the Cherokee Forest area that stands total more than 2,000 acres on park branch and birch branch, that they contain from 37 to 66% chestnut, and some of the timber was practically virgin, and that’s in quotes.
BB: are there any old timers up in Shady Valley that you know of that would have remembered chestnut?
WC: not any more. You’d have been here about 10, 12 years ago I probably could have found people who knowed pretty well. There are a few centenarians around there now, and most of them are women, and in that kind of climate women were much more domestically oriented.
BB: they might remember cooking with it
WC: that was very intensive for them, raising families, working on the farms and the guys probably would have spent more getting in the mountains.
BB: they’re still living over there?
WC: yeah, there’s a few of them, people who are 100 years of age. You might come close to getting a little bit of help here. You going to spend the night here?
BB: yeah.
WC: see if you can find a guy named Martin Hassinger, believe he’s still living. Lives on Arlington Avenue in Bristol, Virginia. His father owned Hassinger Lumber Company, which was the biggest timber operations in the region. They were up in there in the Carlisle period where the day school was. He’s 100 now I’d say. He’s in pretty good shape. To see him you’re going to have to talk to a younger fellow who comes in, stays with him.
[Went to find this guy and he had passed away]
One of the big impacts of the forest industry in this area at that time, which was what he was in, was the railroad. Until they could put railroads up all these little hollows and valleys, there were what they called short track, disparage, a real small railroad company, there were actually 2 of them that ran up into Shady Valley, there was one rail road had one name, and another railroad had another name. I guess by 1908 1910 those things were gone, about that time. So building railroad tracks up in there to get the timber out was a significant part of the operations before the Forest Service got there. One of the things I remember about forests here that I think is important is that, I’ve started going to Shady Valley to study birds in 1961, I was 21 years old. We did not realize, it never occurred to us that by 1900s everything in this part of the world over there in the mountains cut out. This place was denuded of trees, it had the same thing through all this area, even up in Roan Mountain, the Smokies, everything was cut out, till there was nothing left. There were several problems that occurred from that. One problem was the rainstorm that washed so much mud and so much timber and everything down the creeks that it caused enormous flooding. It caused enormous flooding for Knoxville and particularly Chattanooga, Chattanooga had a horrible time with flooding, and then TVA started building dams to control the river flooding. Then the Forest Service was created to try to keep the supply of timber coming, and also the Forest Service was created to try to buy lands because all of this land was in private holding then. That was a very significant thing. We had a Forest Service that was just beginning to operate at the time of the chestnut blight. Just beginning. So they didn’t have much equipment, they didn’t have much staff, they were very busy acquiring land, it was very elementary and minimal time of operation out there. The Forest Service now owns 600 thousand acres in Tennessee. That’s a different ball game. So, by 1961 when I showed up in Shady Valley and I thought I was late in life getting there at 21 years of age, you’ve got to realize that the blight had only been 30 years before. Now it’s been 40 years since I first went there and our perspective on time is an amazing thing. That’s what is most important is to get the perspective of time on this. Your father is about the same age as I am you said, and I’m about the same age too, so when I was about your age I was working for the US Forrest Service. What I didn’t realize was that the forest was only about 30 years of age, to about 40 years of age. It was growing from the time the chestnuts happened to when I got there was 30 years. It’s been 40 years since I got there. I got there in 61, so 47 years ago. So I’ve been studying birds for 50 years, that’s ½ a century, and so there are places where when we were dating, there are places where we were out on this island out on South Holston lake where there were no trees what so ever, and she just took a picture of me standing out there and today it’s a full forest. You know, full of trees. So if the chestnut was such a dominant tree over all this forest then, what would it have been like today if all that chestnut was still growing. Either they would cut it all out, and you’d still be about where you are, or it would be the major timber-producing tree of our time. Because it was a very fast growing tree. Fast growing trees is what the Forest Service wants to harvest now, and that’s why they’re planting so much white pine, and all this, harvesting all the hemlock and white pine. That’s why the percentage of the forest has changed as drastically as it has since1900. The bird population has changed entirely, it’s just an amazing change in bird population since I began at 21 years of age to right now. I mean there are so many species now we can’t even comprehend, that weren’t even there when we started. And that’s because the forest had grown over, matured, and even with the Forest Service is cutting it out they don’t get it fast enough because they can’t get to all of it.
BB: are there any birds that relied specifically on chestnut? Any relationships there?
WC: there was at one time. If you look back to Audubon, the passenger pigeon, there is a great deal written about that. You know, people in Kentucky used to drive their hogs in areas where the chestnuts were falling all over the ground and the big forests, and fatten their hogs on those chestnuts, just move along on the earth doing that. The passenger pigeon was very abundant then. I don’t know if those were connected at all, I don’t know if the passenger pigeon, I doubt if it ever had anything to do with the chestnut tree, but after 1914 the last passenger pigeon was gone, so it was the most abundant bird in North America and it was gone in one lifetime, in one lifetime, that’s an incredible thing. And even, do you know what a starling is?
BB: European starling WC: yeah, one of our most abundant birds. Even back in the 1970s I had some old friends living over at Johnson City, one of them was Bob Lyle, and he and his friend Bruce Tyler had seen the first ever starling in the state of Tennessee’s history.
BB: they were released by a Shakespeare society.
WC: up in New York, central park.
BB: yeah. So in the time that you worked for the Forest Service, you said you gave a lot of tours.
WC: 4 months, went to work with them in May and quit in September.
BB: ok, well then our naturalist position then. Did people ask you about chestnut or talk about chestnut ever, and if so did they ask about a specific thing or what did people-?
WC: not really, but there were times when we talked about it because what happened was starting about 2001 a recreation group out of Damascus, Virginia known as Adventures Damascus had teamed on an agreement with the Nature Conservancy to develop eco- tourism in the region. So Tom Horce, he’s a friend of mine there, owned a place called Adventures Damascus, and he began doing tours, they were advertized in the Nature Conservancy’s national magazine, that’s where he got the people who came to take the tours. So I was tour guide leader for him from probably 2001 up until a couple years ago, for about 5 or 6 years we did tours together. We got people come from museums and faculty people on summer vacation, all over the United States come. And I would talk about the chestnut trees all over the mountains, how fast all that changed and everything, and we would talk about hemlock wooly adelgid and other problems around and just how fast they can happen. I know for a young person like you it is so difficult tog et your mind around a 50 year period, but you live through it it goes so fast, you know, that the most amazing thing is that a young person like you everything is laid out in blocks. You go to kindergarten at a certain age, 6 grades in elementary, 2 or 3 grades in middle school, so many years of high school, 4 years undergraduate, 2 years masters, 5 years or 4 years for PhD, all of the sudden you have no more of those. Its just time eternal working in life, and then all of the sudden you look up and ten years is gone, twenty years is gone, thirty years is gone, and it just went like a flash. And all of the sudden 40 or 50 years went faster than your college experience. Isn’t that amazing? It just seems like it flies by. And so, now with time changing so fast on me over these years, I am able to get a better three dimensional look or time span, whatever, and so I look at our forest lands, our water resources and I look at all of these things in a broader time span. And I look at the environmental problems with a longer time span. I don’t look at this stuff as getting it fixed in 10 years, I don’t look at green house gasses and all of these things as happening in a short period of time.
So you’ve got the American Chestnut Foundation, which is 15 miles from here, and they’ve been experimenting with this for some time. The first thing is you’ve heard, what is the old saying? The greatest plans of mice and men, something like that? Well, what happens is anytime you go back and look at predictions of how long its going to take government to do something, its hardly ever anything like we think. You always have an overly ambitious time frame to do something. So if I said to you I want you to sit down, take a ball point pen and write for me your goals in life and when you’re going to do everything, it would turn out that you really over estimate how fast you’d do it all. So they believe up there that they’re going to create this strain of chestnut. And you know, there’s certain things that are special to us for certain reasons. Billy Amberg, who was a region 9 game biologist for the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency one time gave me a picture of a dog, a black lab he had lost, and it was sitting there in front of his canoe, and he asked me if I could blow that up for him, just wanted that snapshot, and I got the newspaper photographers to get him a big 8 by 10. And I gave it to him and I said you must have loved that old dog, didn’t you. And he looked at me and said, you know what, a dog is like a woman, you can love anything that loves you. And that is a tremendous thought, because what it comes down to is not that you’re going to love any horrible individual because they love you, but basically you can’t really love anybody that doesn’t love you in a sense. It is so mutual. So what happens is that we all have a great need, Billy Amberg said, to know that everything is ok in our environment, this is a passion we have built within us. So everybody wants to save the bald eagle. Not many people what to save that teeny snow spider that’s up there on Carvers Gap on Roan Mountain. The American chestnut, because its such a dominant tree, big forest tree, 7 feet in diameter, 120 feet tall, dominant tree in the forest, suddenly went out in a man’s lifetime it was gone. We can easily get passionate about that tree. We may not get passionate about other trees, so somehow or other you know, they were chestnuts by an open fire of whatever Bing Crosby used to sing about. Some way or another all of this is very romantic, so we’ve set out to save that chestnut tree. In a sense I don’t guess things like that can be funded very well if people don’t have the passion for it. Its hard telling people we need a few million dollars to save a spider. But you can get a lot of people to come up and save a whole forest, and that’s what they’re doing, hundreds of thousands I’m sure. But when they set out and they’re finally gong to take those trees out and plant them is going to be a really bug problem. They are going to have to come up with a scheme, not a plan, but a scheme. Now, a plan is what I write down on a piece of paper as how I think everybody should change a flat tire. A scheme is how you and I are going to get it done when you’re got the flat tire sitting out in a parking lot, or I am, and we’re all going to pitch in and change this tire. So if we have a scheme for how to do this that can be very practical, and if we can afford to do it in our economy and we have priority for these things in balance with all our nation’s needs and we don’t end up fighting enormous battles that are unbelievably expensive to save things like the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid, don’t have time to go back and try to restore something. Then, they can probably get that done. We were trying to release bald eagles on South Holston Lake to restore the population of Bald eagles in the state of Tennessee back in the 90s, 80s and 90s. I took on the job of raising funds for eco-restoration here at South Holston Lake, I went to see a guy who was a big fundraiser in Bristol, and he says you can always raise money to restore something. It’s hard to raise money to just do something that’s well worth wile. But to restore something, people will do that. So he said, you want to be restoring the bald eagle population in the region, not beginning an eagle population in the region. Well, that’s what’s going to happen, it’s a matter of how they’re going to approach it. How they’re going to approach the American chestnut is are they restoring it. And if they’re restoring it who cares? Does the forest industry care? Are we going to restore the American chestnut so we have the entire industry o timber to cut to make furniture and paper, I guess paper mainly comes from a lot of pulp, smaller wood, but are we going to do it for that reason, or are we just gong to restore a big forest of chestnut in the Great Smoky Mountains. Are the people of the region in this nation interested in converting 40 to 60% of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park into a forest of American chestnut? And is there going to be a political battle over it or are we going to restore it just where it once was? Or are we going to try to restore it in places it never really much grew? What are we going to do? If we don’t have a lot of good information about where we’re going to put this stuff out, it’s going to be a problem. So they’re going to try to put it out on national forest land, it wasn’t on much, wasn’t a whole lot of national forest orientation with this when the problem happened, but now they would want to use the national forest service to do it all one way or another. So there’s going to have to be a big cooperative between somebody to do it. And, that big cooperative is to produce money and produce lands and produce the priority in management and priority n the nation’s economy and natural resources to approach that. And that’s got to be sustained for decades. 100 years probably won’t do it. Because it has to become a whole way of life, the chestnut tree has to return until we don’t just have a thousand or two thousand acres of chestnut up on the mountains and people say you want to see what chestnut looked like, come look at it. That’s museum stuff, that’s Disneyland. What we got to have is is that species really come back as a viable part of the southern Appalachian forest scene. And to do that it will take a long, long time and nobody can estimate what that is, nobody. So what we’re setting out on a Christopher Columbus trip to the new world, and nobody can estimate how long it’s going to take for sure to sail those oceans. Nobody knows if we’re going to go off the end of a flat world into space, nobody knows if we’re going to land in the west Indies instead of where we though we were going to land. Nobody knows what kind of Indians are ahead of us in the economy and the environment when the time comes. We don’t even know if the American environmental public will decide that this such a ridiculous thing to be doing for our priorities that we need to get on with a more realistic life, and not worry about that. Meantime the national geographic magazine and everything else is full of these romantic stories about the American Chestnut Foundation, I don’t wish them anything poor, I would wish them success to put it all back like it was, but that’s probably not going to happen.
BB: that was really nice, that whole Christopher Columbus thing. Yeah, what I’ve been asking people, so say they were successful, say its however many years the Indians and all that stuff works out, say it works and there’s chestnuts growing back in Shady valley and around Bristol, how do you think it would be used culturally, economically, ecologically, do you think its roles would be the same or different.
WC: well it’d be two things. There’s no possible way for anyone on earth to know that, point blank. Of I know what the guess is, I’m going to tell you what the guess is. Here’s the guess, when Christopher Columbus set out to cross the ocean he wasn’t really going to take the European civilization to another continent so they could launch a space ship for man to walk on the moon. That was not what he was doing. When we built the space program, the purpose of that was not to build these little teeny cigarette package type tape recorders you’ve got here, and you’ve got a little camera here that is so small that you could put it inside a cigarette package and I’ve got a cell phone that’s half that big. So the question is, who knew that when we were launching into space that we were going to be developing technology that’s so miniature, so lightweight, that in order to be able to carry it into outer space, that this was what it was going to result in. And who knew that this type of electronic component was going to lead to the ability to develop computers. And who knew that computers were going to develop us access to communication systems like the world wide web, and who knew that we were going to have little cell phones that were so teeny tiny. Hey listen, in my life time, I grew up in a time when there was no dial telephones in Bristol, in this city, so you had to pick up a telephone and the operator would come on and say give me your number, and I’d call my father’s business, which was 1-3 was the numbers. Now you you’ve got all these 1-800 number, 1-900 numbers and all else. So look out there in the future and say, and this is the answer, look out there in the future and say what’s going to be the use and how’s it going to be. That’s all going to depend on a technology that’s going to be invented, and other technologies that are going to be invented in the time that comes, that we know nothing about now and we can’t even imagine it. We have no possible way of dreaming the technology. I sit around with some of my young college friends and we all talk about what is going to ultimately be like. Being a bird watcher and always looking for unusual species and things and I joke with some of those college people and I say, what we’ll do one day is we’ll drive down the road with a van, it will have an antenna on the top and what it will be doing is reading all the DNA from all the living birds in the forests nearby, and it counts all the birds and what kind of habitat they’re in, and one of the guys says no, nothing that elementary, what we’ll do we’ll scan it off in space, scan it off in a satellite. Who ever thought you could open Google and look right down, and actually in my nieces yard see their dog. Well, CIA has computer resolution that they can look out from outer space and see a coin laying in a parking lot, and tell you whether it’s heads or tails. I have a telescope that I use in bird watching, I can read the tag on your automobile at almost a mile. So what’s the technology going to be like when we get a chestnut forest back to that, what need will there be? And another thing is we have so much abandoned forest products that no one has any use for. All of these areas set aside as a national forest for trees be what it is today. We developed a national forest at a time when Gifford Pinchot, when he began the US Forest Service said we’ll have forests for the greatest good for the greatest number of people over the greatest period of time. The Forest Service has protected us from fire forever. Smoky Bear was the emblem of don’t let forest fires happen. Then they came to find out that they needed forest fires and they had the wrong emblem. So they took smoky the bear off of everything the Forest Service does, and claimed it belonged to the state forest people, they said it didn’t have anything to do with the Forest Service people, because they’re burning all the mountains now. Now guess what happens? They’re bringing him back, he’s back up on all of the billboards now for the US Forest Service, so we just cycle through that. Is the fire control of our US forests going to become a problem with chestnuts? Do chestnut trees benefit from wild fires, back then when there was no one to fight wild fires? Who knows, we don’t know these things. So that’s why I believe that is we’re looking at the long term thing of what’s going to happen, the one thing we know is that we don’t know. The one thing we know is that the technology and the forest products industry and everything will be an entirely different creature from anything you or I could ever imagine. You may live to see it in your lifetime, I won’t in mine. You probably won’t live to see the chestnut do what it’s going to do, if it becomes anything. Will there be an American Chestnut Foundation in 100 years from now or is that thing grown old. After they got so far they got the trees, got them sitting out there in the orchards, then who wants to do something from there?
BB: a lot of questions
WC: You can have a lot of dreams when you’re out there trying to find out how to make a blight resistant chestnut, but it’s hard to get someone else to buy your dream and carry it on for a century.
BB: I think that’s something they’re realizing and trying to figure out right now.
WC: and if there’s anything you can count on it’s that you can’t count on government. So what happens is government is just as good as whoever is in office. I was listening this morning a new program on CNN where they’re talking about nations all over the world have bought into the greenhouse problem and they’re waiting on the US to get in, and if George Bush is defeated in this election, democrats get in there, people all over the world believe we’ll join the cause for the greenhouse effects and be more contentious with our environmental problems. But that’s only as good as you’ve got a you’ve got a party in office that believes in. It’s only 1970 to now, we’ve already come almost 40 years with earth day, and we still haven’t got it really taken care of, we’re doing better by a long shot, way better. We’ve really come enormously down the pipe with our environmental concerns. For one thing, in 1970 all those college kids going around in black outfits and dressing up like the worlds coming to an end and carrying caskets with black earth on them everything. They’re all CEOs of corporations and everything else, some of them retiring, and they’ve done about as well as they know how to do during their years of industry, they’ve all tried to do well, because they started out with that mentality, before that we never had that. Yeah, that’s really important to know that you’ve got to first make a generation aware and let them grow up to be in charge, and then let them do what they can and make another generation aware until it becomes a part of the whole culture. We’re just starting to get there at 40 years, so another 50 or 60 years we’ll be doing a bit better.
BB: yeah. You’ve already mentioned some but do you have any concerns, hopes, fears, advice, for the chestnut people as they do this restoration project?
WC: my advice to them is that if they really want to make a contribution they get some place where they get more, larger scale think tanks and task force as to how to begin the process. It has to be much bigger than them. It has to be a really, really large scale of implementation. You can’t go over in the woods and plant a few of them. You can do that as soon as you’ve got them, as soon as they think its going to work, but I don’t think they’re going to go over on the side of the mountain and plant a thousand trees or something, stand back and watch it spread all over the forest, that doesn’t happen. So my advice to them is if they really want to make a big contribution they need to find that on a greater scale of think tanks and dreamers. One of the groups that could participate in something like this would be the Nature Conservancy. Now it wouldn’t be up to them to go do it because they say their motto is they’re saving the last great places on earth, so they’re in the save business, they’re not, well they are in the restore business too, they do the bog turtle habitat, and Shady Valley, that sort of thing.
BB: are there any more, do you remember hearing anybody talking about the blight or how they used chestnut?
WC: no, I really don’t have any, I don’t know if I even thought much about how they used chestnut.
BB: you went more to the ecology angle.
WC: didn’t do that intentionally, that’s just sort of where I was. Its kind of like if you go to see a high school football game and a fight breaks out in the end zone and you weren’t too far away, and so you end up in court as a witness to all the people they’re prosecuting in the fight, and its kind of like the world stood still and all the lawyers and jury and everybody thought you should have been standing there memorizing of everybody who threw a punch but in actuality you went to see the football game.
[Another analogy…]
That happened to the people at that time who owned the land that had the chestnut, they didn’t detect it at that time. When we find blights even with the hemlock wooly adelgid and balsam wooly adelgid, every time there’s not anybody who gets really excited about it when it starts because nobody knows how well predictions can be made. Everybody’s heard Chicken Little, the sky is falling. That’s what they’re doing with Al Gore right now, he’s claiming the sky is falling and so are all the ice bergs and everything. Everyone says I’m not sure about that.
BB: I got through most of the questions I had. Are there any other memories, or people I should talk to.
WC: Martin Hasture would be a very good source if you can get to him. Can’t think of anybody old enough, I don’t know people who are out there now. If you’d been here 30 years ago doing this there would have been a lot more, if you’d been here 40 years ago there’d have been a lot of people. Its kind of like anything else you do, there’s less access to memories the longer we wait. Its better to get what you can now like y’all are doing with this research than to not do it at all. Have you looked to see who else is doing this? BB: there’s little things here and there, but there’s no cohesive body of stuff.
WC: what is your universe in this study, what do you define as what you’re looking at?
BB: Southern Appalachian.
WC: have you defined what the southern Appalachians is. I mean everybody knows where north Georgia is, but where do you end.
BB: we’re going as north as southwest Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee
WC: is that because of travel limitations, or time?
BB: yeah, and we’re looking at the cultural and economic importance of the tree and less the ecologic. So, the tree got a lot bigger in the south than it did further north, with mountain people and rural life they relied on the chestnut more than they did further north, so there’s more of a relationship there.