Long before European settlers arrived in Appalachia, the region’s forests were carefully stewarded by Indigenous peoples including the Cherokee, Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, and Mohegan. Through practices like prescribed fire, selective spacing, and replanting, these communities cultivated thriving food forests filled with chestnuts, oaks, hickories, and black walnuts. These low intensity burns returned nutrients to the soil, supported healthy microbial life, and maintained open forest canopies where nut producing trees could flourish. What settlers often perceived as wild forest was actually the result of thousands of years of intentional ecological stewardship.
Research in paleoecology, highlighted by Indigenous scholar Lyla June, shows that around 3,000 years ago Indigenous communities transformed forests in present day Kentucky into abundant food landscapes rich with chestnut, walnut, hickory, and edible understory plants. By the time Europeans arrived, chestnuts made up nearly one fifth of the Appalachian forest canopy, a direct result of generations of Indigenous land management. Chestnuts were a staple food, ground into meal, roasted, or added to breads and stews, and they held cultural and spiritual meaning as well. Much of the chestnut knowledge that shaped Appalachian food traditions was first shared with settlers by Indigenous communities whose relationship with the forest had sustained these ecosystems for millennia.