Chinquapins

When you drive up I-26 heading out of South Carolina into North Carolina, note the signs for Saluda. It was the home of the last important market for chinquapins in the United States. At the train station in Saluda through the 1910s, knots of young boys would sell strings of hulled, boiled chinquapins to passengers. Each boy carried dozens of strings on the crook of his arm or around his neck. These filbert-sized nuts, a diminutive cousin of the American chestnut, were once an autumn delight. Boys would harvest ripe nuts in September, stripping off the prickly hull of five hundred chinquapins in an afternoon, knicking the nuts with a knife, boiling them, and wearing double and triple stringed necklaces of nuts to sell for spending money. But by 1912 lovers of the nuts were mourning its demise. The twin diseases of Chestnut blight and Phytophthora (a root rot) had killed most of the stands of chinquapins that grew on the margins of the eastern forest. These days the Alleghany chinquapin survives wild in isolated patches of the Piedmont and Appalachians.