10/13/2026
Lore Drop: Clements State Tree Nursery and the Last American Chestnut Grove 🌰📜
If you’ve heard us mention Clements lately, this is the story behind it.
What Clements was
Clements State Tree Nursery sits in Lakin , Mason County, right along the Ohio River. It looks like a sleepy little place from the road, but it was serious infrastructure. It took three years of planning, engineering and earthmoving in the early 1960s to build. The fields were precisely sloped and laid with irrigation piping, fed by two big pumps, one diesel and one electric as a backup, pulling thousands of gallons a minute out of the river.
The reason was simple: West Virginia needed millions of tree seedlings every year to reclaim mined land. Clements grew them.
What’s on the hill
At the top of the hill is a grove of about 200 American chestnut trees. Advocates say it was planted in the 1970s from wild chestnuts that survived the blight. The American chestnut was once one of the most important trees in Appalachian forests, for wildlife and for people, until the blight wiped out nearly all of them. Trees grown from blight survivors are rare, and conservationists call groves like this a living library of genes for restoration.
Sally’s story
Sally Shepherd served on the board of the Capitol Conservation District, one of 14 in West Virginia, and worked closely with the nursery. She and other district board members spent about a year fighting to keep Clements open.
She remembers one Saturday in particular, sitting on the back of a field trailer with her 400-gallon water tank while the superintendent drove the tractor slowly around the irrigation fields, watering rows of littleleaf lindens and other seedlings. The lindens were there at the district’s request, because they bloom in June when little else does, which gives bees and other pollinators food at a hard time of year.
“I’ll never forget finishing the last tank on the last row as a full moon came up,” she wrote.
That Monday, locks went on both irrigation pumps.
Sally says the districts even brought the state a working alternative. In 2022 they presented an offer from an established Indiana tree nursery operator to take over Clements, starting at 1.5 to 2 million seedlings a year and supplying West Virginia with 200,000 seedlings suited to the state’s wildlife. The nursery closed anyway.
At one point she was told the chestnut grove would be preserved. In her words: “The public had no idea what a huge and critical piece of infrastructure that sleepy-looking little nursery was.”
What’s happening now
A petition started Oct 7 says the chestnut grove could be cut down as early as November 1. The site is near land planned for the Project Tamarack data center. The project says the old nursery is outside its boundaries, but no parcel maps or site plans have been made public, so nobody outside can check.
The petition asks Governor Morrisey and the WV Division of Forestry to:
• Release the parcel maps and site plans
• Bring in the American Chestnut Foundation
• Hold off on any clearing until the grove’s value is reviewed and options to preserve or relocate the trees are considered
None of that stops anything. It just asks that the trees get a look before they’re gone for good.
What you can do
Sign and share the petition. It’s close to its first 1,000 signatures:
👉 https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-clearing-of-west-virginia-s-rare-american-chestnut-grove
If you know someone at the American Chestnut Foundation, the Division of Forestry, or in Mason County, send this their way.
Thank you to Sally for sharing her memories of Clements, and to everyone who worked to keep it going. đź’š
Stop the Clearing of West Virginia's Rare American Chestnut Grove
