I’d say the chestnut tree
kept a lot of mountain people from starving to death.
Because if you was out in the mountain,
you wasn’t going starve to death.
There was too many chestnuts.
You might get tired of eating them,
but you wouldn’t starve to death.
And people used them back at that time.
You see, people used so many of them.
They would boil them for their young’uns and everything.
Because there wasn’t no running out there to the store.
There wasn’t no such thing as going to the store back then.
Nobody didn’t have it.
And they used that to survive, a lot of them did,
to keep from starving.
They sold them.
You didn’t run to the fruit market up there
just every time you’d need something.
No we didn’t.