President Davidson: Shall we come to order? We now come to the interesting part of our program, and we will listen first to Mr. Quick of West Virginia, who will take the place of Mr. Sayers, the State Forester at Charleston, West Virginia. Mr. Quick. The Development and Propagation of Blight Resistant Chestnut in West Virginia RALPH H. QUICK, Conservation Commission, Charleston, West Virginia Mr. Quick: Ladies and gentlemen of the Association, your guests and friends: In substituting for the State Forester of West Virginia I realize that I am undertaking a big job. A few of you know Mr. Wilson Sayers, who is the State Forester, and those of you who do may assure the rest of the group what a big job I am undertaking, because I feel that I am in pretty good-sized shoes. The subject that has been assigned is The Development and Propagation of Blight Resistant Chestnut in West Virginia. Now, being a forester, I am perhaps interested in blight resistant chestnut from a little different standpoint than the majority of this group. As representing the Conservation Commission of that state I might say that we are interested primarily from the game-food viewpoint. Now, that's a little bit different, I expect, than most of you have been thinking about, or some of you, at least. But that is the standpoint from which we are interested. So I would like to go along with you this afternoon and discuss some of the things that we have done and some of the things that we are learning--there are a few yet--that lead us along that line to believe that we can do something with blight-resistant chestnuts in West Virginia as a game food. We are just at the beginning, so to speak--that is, the Conservation Commission of that state is just at the beginning of our study. We have been fooling with it a little off and on since back in the middle '30's, but interest has lagged and then has picked up again two or three times. I am sure that as far as the production of good strains of blight-resistant chestnut, better strains of Chinese, and so on, that there are people 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.