Off The Record
When Loggers Cut Down Old Tree – They Couldn’t Believe What They Found Inside
Logging is a fairly routine job and forestry workers know what could be expected on a typical work day.
Loggers spend their day chopping down heavy trees safely and bringing them to the processing plants to be made into lumber or pulp and paper, but for a team from the Georgia craft Co. back in 1980 their average workday would turn out to be anything but ordinary when they cut down an unusually light and hollow tree.
Georgia crafts Co is a paper mill Machinery business located in Jasper Georgia. Part of their work involves chopping wood for paper pulp so they headed out one day in 1980 to cut some trees in a nearby forest. They were not expecting the surprise that they would find inside one of the trees.
The American chestnut tree grows very quickly almost 4 times faster than oak which makes it highly valuable for loggers in the early 20th century. A fungal blight wiped out nearly all of the American chestnut trees with only a few specimens remaining in pockets of Nova Scotia New Hampshire Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee for years.
Chestnut with its bold grained blondish wood was favored by builders as it easily worked and was extremely rot resistant. Chestnut trees have a number of interesting characteristics and one of those resulted in a phenomenon that would stun the loggers from the Georgia craft company.
Having marked the trees they had to chop the loggers began to work. They expected to spend the whole day putting down chestnut trees but when the first axe struck a particular tree the workers quickly realized it was hollow. Though a hollow tree is not ideal for sawing into lumber the loggers knew that the hollow chestnut tree would still produce very high-quality pulp so they continued to chop not realizing what was hidden inside with the tree…
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