The Cradle of Forestry in America, in North Carolina’s Transylvania County, was the site of the nation’s first forestry school and you can still visit the one-room school house the students used. It’s appropriate then, that beside this schoolhouse is planted a young chestnut tree. The American chestnut was once the most abundant tree in Eastern hardwood forests, and was functionally eliminated by an Asian fungus, the chestnut blight. The tree beside the schoolhouse isn’t a pure American chestnut, but a hybrid – 15/16ths American chestnut, and 1/16th Chinese chestnut, which affords it resistance to the blight. There’s hope this hybrid is the key to returning the chestnut to Eastern forests.