Tennessee ranging in altitude from something over a mile high down to some 300 or 350 feet at Memphis on the Mississippi gives us a very, very wide range of climate. This wide range of climate gives us the possibility of growing a very wide range of timber trees. A great part of that area is soil from a limestone formation. Nearly all parts of Tennessee are well adapted to the production of the black walnut. The tree as a nut tree has not in the past been looked at with such great interest. However, there are farms in Tennessee that have been purchased with walnut kernels. Over the period of years, why, thrifty families, especially in Eastern Tennessee sections, have gathered up the walnuts in the neighborhood round about, cracked them and sold the kernels and from year to year made certain accumulations of that kind, funds, and saved them with enough in the bank or in the sock to buy a farm. I knew one particular person who bought a nice farm in just that way.
Now, a great many of the people in the same neighborhood did not save their walnuts. These walnuts were gathered from everybody's trees without any objection on the part of anyone. But it was a means of those people getting ahead with their savings from their other farming operations, and this wintertime work that they could put in, why, that kind of thrift is the kind that gets people ahead who want to get ahead and have vision.
I might say a few words about pecans in Tennessee. We have throughout the state quite a few scattered native pecans that are used, especially in all except the more western sections of the state. As a whole they are for home use. Now, in the extreme western section of the state we have a certain amount of seedling pecans, mostly, that produce a considerable income to a limited number of people. In the 1945 census something over 4,000 farms reported some income from pecans—this was mostly in the western section of the state—the value of which was something over $32,000, which at the present time would be a considerable under-valuation.
This tree is found, I might say, throughout the state. I recall a few years ago coming off of the Cumberland Plateau down in Warren County into the cove there around Viola and seeing a beautiful grove of pecans along a stream. I hadn't been through that country before, but I had known a family that lived there, and I stopped at a house to see just what those pecans meant. And there was an old lady on the porch who owned the property, and I asked her some questions about it, and she told me how they got there and knew when they were not there. She had been raised on that place but she said, "I want to show you something." So I went with her around the side yard into the back yard, and she had a couple of pecan trees there that were loaded with pecans until the limbs were hanging over just like pear tree limbs, heavily loaded pear tree limbs. I said, "My, what a crop of pecans you have here. That's really wonderful." Those were the budded pecans, the type that is grown farther south of us. She said, "Just wait a minute, now. I don't know whether I have any pecans or not." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "If the frost is two weeks later than usual we will have a wonderful pecan crop, if we have a late frost. If we have an early frost we don't have any pecans."
It was quite interesting to me to see that wonderful crop hanging on the tree and yet she wasn't at all assured that anything of value would come from it.
We have on some of our holdings at the University experimental Stations some wonderful Chinese chestnut trees. I can't get overly excited over them, remembering the chestnut as we had it once in Tennessee with the long, slender body, wonderful telephone poles and wonderful timber of other kinds, and to see that a tremendous economic loss has come to this country through disease that was and probably is not controllable. But from the nut standpoint we have at the present time some trees that look as though they are going to be the equal of our own native chestnut that covered Tennessee from the mountain top to the river bank. So we are very much in hope that again Tennessee will have a supply of chestnuts which will be equivalent, probably, to the harvest of chestnuts we once had. However, that's going to be many, many years off.
From the experimental standpoint I have been very much interested in the timber type of tree, hoping that our native chestnut trees, at least one out of the billions, maybe would prove to be resistant. However, watching these growths come up from time to time and attain an age sufficient to produce nuts and then have my hopes blighted by going back the next year and finding that the tree was blighted has become rather discouraging. I hope that some of you people will find just such a tree, one that will bear an excellent nut and at the same time produce excellent timber.
Now I am coming to our big asset in the way of nut trees in Tennessee, as I see it. I was rather interested here in Professor Moore's discussion of the honeylocust, that detestable tree which was such a thorn in my flesh as a child, and having heard someone championing it with such a story as he had, I have heard everything now. Everybody, though, has a champion. Even my mother loved me, regardless.
Black walnut is, as I said in the beginning, native to all sections of the state, and I think that through the collection of the better yielding or better cracking nuts by the Tennessee Valley Authority we are going to find in this crop a very potent asset to the state of Tennessee through the income from sale of nuts. We have in the state about four cracking plants. One of them is located in Morristown. Down in the basin part of the state where walnuts do particularly well, three others are in the city of Nashville. There were something like 10 million pounds of walnuts in the shell delivered in Nashville this last year, yielding about 1,200,000 pounds of kernels. Now, this is no mean return from a crop which was really just gathered up with very, very little attention given to the planting. It is just one of these free crops, so to speak.
If we were to add to that income the great income which we have been receiving through the years from the sale of timber trees, we would run the value of the black walnut into considerable proportions, with income from the sale of black walnuts in the kernel and in timber.