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 of hill land near the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, stump grafted to Paragons. In the year 1908, before this orchard was mature and after the blight had begun to kill trees, it produced thirteen hundred bushels, which netted five and one-half cents per pound. C. K. Sober, of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, had three hundred or four hundred acres on a nearby mountain ridge. I had twenty-five acres on the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia about fifteen miles southwest of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. These are only a few of the plantings.

Then came the chestnut blight. It came with an importation of some Oriental plants. It spread concentrically from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, where it first broke out in 1904. In a few years all these commercial orchards were gone. I turned the planting over to the U. S. Department of Agriculture for experimental spraying. They did everything they could think of, but by 1925 every tree was dead on my twenty-five acres save one Japanese tree which sprang up from a seed dropped from a Japanese variety. It is still there.

This blight is a fungus which gets through the bark, lives in the cambium, spreads concentrically, girdles the tree, and kills it. The spores seem to spread by means of birds, winds, and probably commerce in many forms. All attempts to stop it have failed. All attempts to kill it by sprays have failed. It has spread to the outer limit of the chestnut area in the East, the North, the West, and the South and is now finishing off the chestnuts in the southern Appalachians.

No tree has been found completely proof to the blight, but trees differ greatly in their capacity to resist it. A nice chestnut tree that shaded my Virginia mountain porch began to blight in 1908. In five years it was dead, but some trees in the nearby mountain still survive, now in 1950, through the process of throwing up suckers when the tree is girdled. The sucker thrives until it gets to be the size of a baseball bat; then the smooth bark begins to crack, the spores enter, and the blight starts. These shoots often bear a crop of nuts the year they die.