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.
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.