work was expanded
and has been carried on actively to date. From 1927 to 1930, the
Division conducted an extensive exploration in search of orchard and
timber-type chestnut in China, Korea, and Japan, and imported over 250
bushels of chestnut seed, representing four species.

During the early 1930's the Division of Forest Pathology distributed
thousands of chestnut seedlings, grown from the imported chestnut seed.
The planting stock was made available to interested Federal and State
agencies, as well as to owners of farm woodlands, located in 32 Eastern
States. The cooperators were asked to establish small experimental
forest plantings with the trees furnished them. It was believed that
such wide distribution of the many kinds would readily demonstrate which
ones possess the desired timber-tree form, or possessed the ability to
bear large crops of nuts suitable to wildlife; and would furnish
valuable information on their site requirements.

As we now know, most of these early cooperative experimental forest
plantings were doomed to failure because often the chestnut trees were
planted on dry, grassy areas having infertile, shallow soil. Another
serious contributing factor in poor establishment was the severe general
droughts that occurred over most of the eastern half of the United
States in the early thirties. But despite these heavy losses, a few
plantations succeeded, in part, and from these limited areas, and from a
few earlier plantations that succeeded, valuable information on their
general site requirements was obtained; however, we still lacked
information on specific differences in behavior between the progeny, as
fast-growing forest trees or nut producers in the forest.

From these early plantings we learned that (1) Asiatic chestnuts and
hybrids are more likely to develop into forest trees when planted on
cool, moist, fertile situations; (2) in their silvicultural
characteristics they are more nearly like our native yellow-poplar,
northern red oak, and white ash, than like our American chestnut and
native chinkapins; (3) with respect to tolerance of shade, they are much
like our northern red oak; and (4) neither the Chinese nor the Japanese
chestnut has quite the same forest-type growth as that of our native
American chestnut.

With this background of experience, the U. S. Division of Forest
Pathology from 1936 to 1939 established a series of 21 climatic test
plots on above-average sites on Federal- and S