Dr. Baker Huff has been hooked on American chestnuts for a long time.

Long before the creation of The American Chestnut Foundation, Dr. Huff, who is a retired physician living in Atlanta, became interested in growing chestnuts. He is now the proud proprietor of a number of nut producing American Chestnut trees. At the meeting at Fort Mountain in July, Dr. Huff brought seven chestnut seedlings to give away. These trees were raffled off and raised $175 to use toward the cost of the meeting and cookout. Dr Huff told us the seedlings are the offspring

of an American Chestnut tree on his property in Atlanta and originated from seeds that were given to him by Mr. Leo Pope of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Pope's trees were grown from seeds from the Martha Washington vineyard in Virginia. While we are uncertain of the genetic makeup of the Huff trees, it is impressive that none of his trees have been stricken by the blight, according to Dr. Huff. We are grateful to Dr. Huff and all those who participated.

The tree winners were David Keehn, James Gelin,

 Ronnie Kemp, John Little, John Lewis and Jim Hill.

James Gelin named his tree Miss Price after Mary Belle Price who drew the names of the winners. We hope the winners will continue to let us know how their trees are doing! Dr. Huff also donated approximately 300 nuts from his trees to the Georgia chapter. These nuts will be incorporated into the Lula Lake Land Trust chestnut research.

On October 3rd, Dave Keehn, the chapter'.s Chestnut Location Chair, held a chestnut identification workshop at his home in Epworth. Dave created an informative display of leaf samples from several chestnut species, including American Chestnuts. The display included leaves from some unrelated species that may be mistaken for chestnut as well as twig and burr samples and some printed handouts.

(Castanea pumila) and, right next to it, a 15 foot American chestnut that hopefully will flower next spring.

Dave will be organizing chestnut hunting expeditions beginning in the Spring. Several members have already expressed an interest in participating in these.

speaking, those that are at least 10 feet in height, 2 inches or more in diameter and exposed to full sun. While we would love to find large, surviving .mother trees., these are exceedingly rare. Any flowering, 100% American chestnut tree native to Georgia (versus planted trees of unknown origin) will provide the sought after genetic strain to crossbreed with TACF pollen to create a Georgia variety of blight resistant chestnut. With a little luck, we'll have our first nuts next Fall!