Did American Chestnut Really Dominate the Eastern Forest?

Dominant species, in the words of forest ecologist E. Lucy Braun, are "those trees of the canopy, or superior arboreal layer, which numerically predominate."Given American chestnut's purported prior dominance in the eastern deciduous forest, we would expect the tree to have ranged widely across the East relative to other common tree species and to occupy a superior place in written accounts by early naturalists and explorers, early land survey records, forest surveys of the early twentieth century, and the paleoecological record.In fact, these sources reveal a very different story.