Guest Blog: The Reforestation of the Tennessee River Valley
By: Dr. Carrie Barske Crawford, University of North Alabama
About ten years ago, I learned that the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) had a test orchard on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Reservation in Muscle Shoals. During the first half of the twentieth century, a blight wiped out millions of chestnut trees throughout the eastern portion of the United States. North Alabama was the southern end of the tree’s range. In the 1980s, a group of scientists and volunteers formed TACF to research species restoration. One of their primary methods has been backcross breeding, mixing American chestnuts with Chinese chestnuts to create a blight resistant tree—a trait Chinese chestnuts have that American chestnuts lack. In order to carry out this mission, TACF has developed test orchards across the tree’s historic range to breed trees and test for blight resistance. A TVA employee got involved in TACF and started the test orchard on the reservation, which is monitored and cared for by TACF’s Alabama Chapter and TACF’s Southern Regional Science Coordinator. Learning about the test orchard led me to write an essay about the restoration of the species for a new collection of essays published by the University of Massachusetts Press, Branching Out: The Public History of Trees (2025).
As with many research projects, I uncovered many interesting stories while working on this essay, one of which has become a new project for me. The land where TACF plants trees today was the site of the Muscle Shoals Forest Nursery, which TVA operated from 1933 to 1960. We often think of TVA in terms of power generation, river navigability, flood control, and electrification but they also did a great deal of work to combat erosion in the Tennessee River Valley, including growing and planting trees. Between the Muscle Shoals Forest Nursery and the Clinton Nursery in Clinton, Tennessee, TVA grew over 600 million trees. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) carried out much of the planting work on public and private land until their dissolution in 1942. In Alabama, the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service (ACES) also distributed TVA’s trees to landowners to plant on their own, as the CCC could not fulfill all planting requests. In both cases, landowners agreed to protect the trees from fire and grazing animals for the period of five years. TVA grew a variety of tree species over the course of the program, including short leaf, loblolly, and slash pines, as well as black locust, yellow-poplar, black walnut, red gum, white ash, cypress, red maple, black gum, willow oak, water oak, black oak, white oak, and northern red oak. Unfortunately, they also grew and distributed kudzu for erosion control purposes. We all know how that turned out!
TVA’s reforestation efforts combatted erosion, gave farmers a new “crop” to sell, and helped wildlife populations—including turkey and white tail deer—recover. All of these benefits improved the overall health of the watershed. TVA’s tree planting program, as well as those coordinated by state nurseries in the TVA service region, helped to bring in new industries, including paper and pulpwood production, which provided jobs to valley residents.
Exploring this rich (and largely neglected) story certainly has allowed me to think a great deal about the value of our forests and why their health is important to our own well-being. To learn more, keep your eyes peeled for the summer 2025 issue of Alabama Heritage which includes the first of hopefully many articles on this topic.
Arthur Rothstein, Wilson Dam, Alabama (Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)). Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) boys weeding seedlings at TVA nursery, June 1942, photograph, 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 (inches), Florence, Alabama.
