Trees.Breckinridge.HISTORY-OtherFrom: KyArchives [Archives@genrecords.org] Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2006 2:56 PM To: Ky-Footsteps Subject: Trees.Breckinridge.HISTORY-Other Trees Breckinridge County KyArchives History Other Book Title: A Glimpse Of The Past The American chestnut was once one of the most valuable trees growing in the United States. It grew from southern Maine, west to Michigan, and south to northern Georgia and Alabama. By the mid 1900s Endothia parasitica, a blight that was first noted in 1904 killed most every specimen. The fungus was imported into New York City and it spread all over the whole country. The Forest Service found out that the blight came from Asia, shipped over in lumber or something. The blight was still attaching trees in the early 1940s. There are a few of the big old trees around. The trees grew straight and fast, often reaching heights of over one hundred feet, and diameters of seven feet. It was a superior source of timber, food and tanning. The wood lasted practically forever. And the chestnuts were a tremendous source of food for people, their animals and wild animals. The nuts grow inside a burr and it's a big thing, as big as your fist and along about the fall of the year when it starts frosting they will open. Then the chestnuts fall out and later the burr its self will drop off. October was the main chestnut month. The ground would just be covered with nuts and people picked them up to sell or store for winter use. Whenever, they went to falling, a wagoner would come through the country and buy them and travel on South to sell them. This was a way of receiving money for shoes, clothes, etc. Chestnuts were boiled, roasted or just hung up to dry. A good way to keep them through the winter was to put them in a box and sprinkle with salt to keep the worms out. People used the chestnut for acid wood, pulpwood, telephone poles, cross ties, fence rails, ditch timber, furniture, farming and siding. The chestnut was the best splitting timber for the rail fences. A good working man, who didn't have iron or steel hammers and wedges, would just take a white iak maul, then take dogwood and make a whole lot of wedges. He could take that maul and wedge and split one hundred fence rails a day. It made good firewood. It had to be seasoned for green chestnut wouldn't burn. At one time the sweet birch provided oil for much of the wintergreen flavoring used for candy, gum and medicine. Twigs and root bark are used for tea and trees were tapped so sap can be used for sugar or birch beer. Sweet burch bark may easily be peeled off to chew like chewing gum. The inner bark is an emergency food if you are lost in the woods. For birch beer the trees were tapped when the sap was rising. Jug sap and throw in a handful of shelled corn and nature finishes the job. The earliest visitors to America were struck with the aromatic sassafras tree they found growing here and once believed it endowed with great medicinal virtues. Some of the early explorers carried home a cargo of sassafras. If these people could have come inland a few centuries later, they would have found enough for several cargoes,especially on worn out hill land where only sassafras and persimmon bushes are hardy enough to grow. Europeans were thus introduced to sassafras and the tea that we enjoy every spring became well known. The tea is effective in washing down the soot that collected in the chimney. However much of the beverage might be liked by chimney-sweepers, it is better liked by plain Americans, who annually must go through the process of thinning down their blood after the winter has waned. Tea is the national drink of Great Britain, but sassafras tea is the brand of the real American. Tea is the poetic side of sassafras bushes that were cut in the spring before the plowing started. There is still another side to sassafras that few people associate with either tea or sprout cutting. In the fall no bushes have such exquisite colors. Old fields that are too poor to produce crops of value suddenly blossom out in pinks, yellow and oranges that mock the artists best efforts. Kentucky fencerows are outlined with brilliant bushes. Long ago the sassafras trees have disappeared from most places; now we associate the name only with bushes along the fences and out in the upland field. Maple syrup and sugar were the most sought after sweetening by Kentucky housewives, since Daniel Boone came through the Cumberland Gap, explored and settled within it's boundaries. Maple, from which this delicacy originates, is known be several names, depending on the speaker and his meaning. Sugar maple and sugar trees are the names used when referring to their role in the sweetening industry; hard rock or had maple are the names used when their wod is used in lumber and furniture industries. However, they are the same trees, but their use is two fold. The sugar industry uses only the sweet water that accumulates during the growing season and can be drawn off by tapping when spring thaws release it circulation, with little damage to the tree. The term tapping is used in gathering the sap or water to be boiled in large kettles until it becomes syrup. If sugar is wanted, it is boiled until the syrup condenses into a solid. The sugar water is obtained by boring holes around the base of the tree and inserting hollow tubes called spiles long enough from the base to accommodate vessels underneath to catch the liquid as it flows from the spiles. The liquid is gathered at intervals and taken to the boiling kettles, where it is cooked into the product desired. Either syrup or sugar could be used as a food or sweetener. It takes 40 gallons of juice to make on gallon of syrup. Submitted by: Dana Brown http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00005.html#0001067 This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/kyfiles/