By Susan Milius
Ron Bockenhauer sounds remarkably cheerful for a man living among orphans of one of the country’s most infamous ecological tragedies. He resides in the largest remaining stand of American chestnut trees. The straight-trunked giants once accounted for a third or more of the trees covering the Appalachian chain, and wags claimed that a squirrel could go from Maine to Georgia by jumping from chestnut to chestnut and never touching the ground. In 1904, a killer fungus showed up in New York and swept throughout the range. The chestnut forests vanished.
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Devastating as the chestnut blight was, it missed some trees. Bockenhauer’s grandfather lived in Wisconsin, outside the normal range of the American chestnut. Around the beginning of the 20th century, a neighbor planted a grove of American chestnuts. For years, separated from the epidemic’s hot zone, the stand expanded to some 60 acres, moving onto Bockenhauer’s property.