Chestnuts

Before the Horlbeck family began planting pecan nuts shipped from Texas in the fields around Boone Hall Plantation in the 1830s, and before Carolinians began calling pindars (Arachis hypogeia, a legume) peanuts in the 1830s, one nut loomed foremost in people’s imaginations as the “nut of the country.” It was the chestnut. The American chestnut (Castenea dentate) dominated the eastern hardwood forest and covered the hills and mountains in the western counties of the state.