ple in West Virginia who are more capable of telling you
what has been done from a private viewpoint than anyone with the
Conservation Commission, but we are interested in learning about it and
producing it in large numbers for a game food, and, of course, if we are
interested in distributing from our nursery over the state for that
purpose, we are interested in producing better strains of
blight-resisting chestnut as we go.

Along back in the 1920's a few plantations, or a few trees were planted
in the state by what was then the old Fish and Game Commission, and the
records have been lost, as has been true in many other states. But then,
apparently, the beginning was made. In going over some of those early
plantings I will only have time to hit the high spots and the ones in
which we are particularly interested in our line, but the first ones
were back there somewhere in the '20's.

One of the best plantations, the one that we are particularly interested
in at the present time, is in Jackson County, West Virginia, and it is
of the University of Nanking strain, and there were 34 trees planted
there back in 1926, and we are told that they were planted from 2-0[1]
stock, from nuts that came from China in 1924. Twenty-six of those trees
survived, and we think they are pretty good nuts. You may be interested
to know that that plantation now averages 22 feet in height and has an
average diameter at breast height of 8 inches. The spacing in that
plantation was 26 by 26 feet.

Now, we can't take credit, nor do we want to take credit, for that
plantation. The state agency had nothing to do with it. It was put in
there through the cooperation of the gentlemen from Beltsville, but we
are very much interested in that plantation; so interested that we have
gone to the owner, along with the permission of the fellows from
Beltsville, and sewed the thing up for a five year period, during which
time we hope to get the seed and to improve our own strains and
establish blocks of our own on state-owned land under different
conditions and on different sites where we expect in the future to be
able to secure seed for our use and production at the nursery.

In the first few years that this plantation that we are speaking of in
Jackson County produced, not many people paid much attention to it or
attached much significance to it. The man who had charge of it gave the
nuts away for experimental purposes or for any reason that anybody
happe