"Flooded...Yet Knott Alone" by Miriam Moyer.

With the massive flooding and steadily rising death toll from the flood in Texas on July 4, 2025, I am certain that quite a few people might be interested in this book by Miriam Moyer, a Mennonie woman and writer who lives in Knott County. The book contains nearly fifty short chapters, which Moyer describes in the subtitle as "short stories of what Knott County people experienced in the July 28, 2022, flood." In spite of the large number of what I have called "chapters" and Moyer calls "short stories", the book is only 303 pages and is a fairly fast read if you don't allow yourself to be overcome by the constantly repititous stories of near death and survival by only a hairsbreadth. I met Moyer and bought the book in October 2024 at the Alice Lloyd College Appalachia Day where she was selling the book. Although I have numerous friends in the conservative Mennonite congregations in Knott, Johnson, and Morgan counties in Eastern Kentucky, I had never met Miriam Moyer until that day at Alice Lloyd. As a native of Knott County, I was interested in reading about the floods even though I had no direct contacts among the hundreds of victims who survived or the 19 dead from the flood. I always have a large "To Be Read" shelf of books and it is pure coincidence that I had started the book in time to complete it during the week of the Texas flood. The book is based on recorded interviews with numerous victims of the flood, local officials, recovery workers, and others in the county. I firmly believe that if Mirian Moyer still owns the recordings of those interviews they deserve to be placed in a legitimate historical library setting such as the Special Collections Department at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Those interviews will be of significant interest to writers, researchers, and family members of victims for the entire foreseeable future. But I was disppointed to see that Moyer did not use a lot of direct quotations from the interviews in the book. Instead, she used very minimal direct quotes and paraphrased parts of what I assume were the recordings to compose the individual chapters. The book also has a strongly religious focus as does all writing I have ever read from members of conservative Mennonite congregations. I have no issue with that religious aspect of the book since it is universal in Mennonite books. But the book lacks a great deal of information of a first person historical nature from the interviewees themselves. The maanner in which the interviews were utilized to write the book leaves a great deal to be desired in the final product. But I give full credit to Miriam Moyer for the massive amount of time she spent traveling the county, interviewing the subjects, and making an attempt to preserve their stories of the disaster as it affected them. I would love to listen to the tape recordings or read transcripts of them. They deserve to be preserved in a stable setting where general access could be granted to researchers and the general public under controlled conditions. One other shortcoming of the book is that there is very limited information from survivors of the dead victims and no full listing of the Knott County dead. But the book is worth reading from most of the general public. It can be purchased directly from Miriam Moyer at this address which is published in the book: Miriam Moyer 4589 Possum Trot Road Leburn, KY 41831 606-497-6527

Saving The American Chestnut Tree

 

As a boy growing up in Appalachia, I heard many stories about the blight which killed nearly all the American Chestnut trees, literally wiping them out over most of the United States.  Chestnut lumber was highly valued and, during my childhood, was commonly found in houses, barns, and outbuildings all over Eastern Kentucky where I grew up.  Now nearly all that chestnut lumber has disappeared due to either rot, fires, and floods or the destruction of older buildings because their owners did not like the looks or they did not know the value of the lumber. What little can be found is still highly valued all across the Appalachian region for use in interior decorating settings in homes, businesses, and offices.  

Luckily, there is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation, propagation, and proliferation of the American Chestnut tree.  That organization is called The American Chestnut Foundation and can be found at this link.  The organization cites ten reasons for saving the American Chestnut: 

1.  it will restore America's forests and improve biodiversity; 
2. it will restore what is sometimes referred to as the "cradle to grave tree"   for its variety of uses, it was an important food source and cash crop for the people of Appalachia and was also commonly known as a food source for free ranging livestock, especially hogs, in the days before livestock laws became common and required all livestock to be kept in fenced areas. 
3.  it is also an excellent wildlife food source for everything ranging from large birds to deer, wild hogs, and bear.
4. Its fast growth and tolerance of rocky, acidic, and poor soils, makes it perfect for returning degraded landscapes to fruitful condition, including those left by strip mining, to diverse and healthy forests
5. restoring the American Chestnut will provide a better understanding of saving other such endangered trees and protecting all of America's forests.
6. the American Chestnut produces excellent, durable, decorative lumber of a very high quality.
7. the fruit of the American Chestnut has a better, sweeter flavor than the Chinese Chestnut or other varities and is more useful in cooking.
8. the American Chestnut makes an excellent tree for shade and landscaping purposes.
9. the wood is also an excellent product for use in high quality production of furniture and decorative objects.
10. restoring the American Chestnut will achieve final success against one of the worst ecological disasters on the American continent.      
    

 

Numerous media outlets have addressed the issue of saving the American Chestnut ranging from the Cincinnati Magazine to the New York Times to Mother Earth News.     In April 2020, the New York Times Magazine published and article about the possibility of using genetic engineering to save the American Chestnut as did  Colleen J. Muvihill, a microbiologist at the University of Texas at Austin.   But there have been only a very small number of living, resistant American Chestnut trees found in America and the genetic engineering necessary to propagate them and save blight resistant progeny has several inherent problems which numerous scientists are working to solve.  Whatever is done over the next decades to save this American giant, should be performed with both haste and caution.  That is to say that we must work to save the tree while we still have a few healthy living specimens with which to work and yet scientists must not rush headlong into the project without due regard for potential red flags which arise along the way regarding the possibility of breeding flaws into the final products which could range from susceptibility to other diseases, sterility, and even some that we cannot foresee at this  time.  But the possibility of achieving a day when the American Chestnut tree is once again abundant nation wide is well worth the effort and expense.  

Syracuse University is working on a project involving genetic engineering to save the tree.  Because their trees are genetically modified organisms (GMO's) the university is required to guarantee that they do not release pollen into the wild and must bag every flower on every tree, build deer proof fences, and install aluminum mesh to prevent squirrels from carrying pollen away to other sites.  There is a very realistic hope that they will soon be able to propagate their variety of American Chestnut in wild forests with government approval.  Let's all hope for that day to come.  I eagerly look forward to smelling a roasting American Chestnut on a hearth at Christmas time.  I hope you do too.  

Since I posted this blog yesterday on several Facebook groups, a large number of people who obviously have Chinese Chestnut trees on their property have been commenting about how certain they are that theirs are American Chestnut trees.  So I am posting links here to a couple of web sites which have very good descriptions of the differences between the American Chestnut tree and the Chinese Chestnut.  Before you go off the deep end believing you have an American Chestnut treee check both the websites and your tree so you know the difference.  

This is the link to the American Chestnut Foundation website's page with photos and clear cut descriptions of the differences between the two trees.  

This is the link to the Virginia Tech University website's page with equally accurate descriptions and photos of the differences between the two trees.