Logging is a fairly routine job, and forestry workers know what to expect on a typical workday. Loggers spend their day bringing down heavy trees safely and bringing them to the processing plants to be made into lumber or pulp and paper.
But for a team from the Georgia Craft Co back in 1980, their average workday would turn out to be anything but ordinary when they cut down an unusually light and hollow tree.
Georgia Craft Co is a paper mill machinery business located in Jasper, Georgia. Part of their work involves acquiring wood for paper pulp, so they headed out one day in 1980 to cut some trees in a nearby forest. They were not expecting the surprise that they would find inside one of the trees.
The American chestnut tree grows very quickly, almost four times faster than oak, which makes it highly valuable for loggers. In the early 20th century, a fungal blight wiped out nearly all of the American chestnut trees, with only a few specimens remaining in pockets of Nova Scotia, New Hampshire, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee.
For years, chestnut, with its bold grained blondish wood, was favored by builders as it was easy to work with and extremely rot-resistant.
Chestnut trees have a number of interesting characteristics, and one of those resulted in a phenomenon that would stun the loggers from the Georgia Craft Co. Having marked the trees they planned to fell, the loggers began to work. They expected to…….Read Full Story Here………
