The American Chestnut Blight

In the summer of 19 o four a man named herman merkle noticed small orange dots on more and more trees. A researcher from the new york bota a garden told the paper that the disease was a fungus that appeared to kill the tree from the inside. Boy scouts volunteered to search through forests to find any chestnut trees that had signs of the blight, then chop them down and burn them. In february of 19 12, scientists and politicians gathered in harrisburg, pennsylvania to talk about what to do. No one could stop it. As the science writer susan frankle wrote in her book, american chestnut, the blight killed between three and