Of chestnuts, festivals and the place we call home
There’s a new festival in town.
This past weekend saw the first-ever PA Chestnut Festival, held in Castanea to a stupendous turnout well in the hundreds, despite the freezing temperatures.
The addition of the Chestnut Festival to the region’s thriving pool of events, fairs and fests brings some activity to one of the coldest — and typically quietest — times of the year.
And, its success shows that the cold won’t stop people from turning out for a good time, which opens the door to more winter events being added to the region’s roster.
This is a big win for the whole area. It brings in more family-friendly activities for residents and their kids, more revenue to area businesses, vendors and artists, and raises the profile of Clinton County as a tourist hub.
Consider this quote from Committee Chair Rick Schulz during the event: “We increasingly are seeing people at the booths from outside of the county, too. Which, of course, makes us even happier.”
These kinds of events and their continued growth and success is a major source of hope for the area.
Some people are fond of mourning the region’s past — the diminishment of local manufacturing and business, population and service decline are popular topics of complaint, among others.
This is somewhat mirrored by the American Chestnut itself, although the tree has definitely had it worse.
The chestnut is an important symbol for the area. Many people, especially younger readers, may not know the story of the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata).
Many residents have likely never seen this tree in the wild, despite it being the origin of the town’s name.
A keystone species throughout much of the eastern United States, especially throughout the Appalachian region, it is estimated that billions of these trees died due to a blight introduced accidentally from overseas.
The functional extinction of this tree had massive ramifications for our ecosystem, and likely caused the extinction or diminishment of many other species who depended upon the tree.
Some American Chestnuts do survive in the wild, although vanishingly few have reached maturity, and those are protected fiercely. Many others struggle with a grim fate: their trunks and roots continue to send up new shoots, healthy, for a time… before the blight arrives from nearby incubators — frequently oak trees — and kills the new growth once again in a natural example of the myth of Sisyphus.
There are attempts in progress to do complicated genetic hybridization with blight-resistent strains of other species of chestnut in an effort to produce a chestnut with a majority of American genes, but that is capable of withstanding the blight.
We hope that these efforts bear fruit — or nuts, we suppose — and that one day, some year in the future, the PA Chestnut Festival can welcome this native tree back to the town that bears its name.
Until then, the festival can keep the legacy of this keystone species alive while contributing to the future of Clinton County.
Much like the tree, people here are fighters. While we haven’t been exempt from the decline which has struck rural America, there are some really great, upstanding people who are putting in a lot of work to figure out ways to bring some of yesteryear’s glamour back to the county.
The chestnut is an allegory for Clinton County that we can all be proud of.
Be like the chestnut: keep on fighting for a better tomorrow.