a nonprofit scientific and educational foundation dedicated to restoring the American Chestnut to its former place in our Eastern hardwood forests. Priorities include the development of blight-resistant all-American chestnuts and economical biological control measures against chestnut blight in the forest environment.
As of April 2007, American chestnut cooperators have planted 117,792 seedlings and 59,628 seednuts from our all-American orchards.
In the first 40 years of the 20th century, blight destroyed 3.5 billion American chestnuts. What had been the most important tree in our Eastern forest was reduced to insignificance. No comparable devastation of a species exists in recorded history.
The principal objective of the American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation is to raise funds to support graduate and undergraduate student research projects in Virginia Tech’s Department of Plant Pathology, Physiology & Weed Science. This research makes possible the seedling and nut distributions from our all-American breeding program to restore American chestnuts to our forests.