The American Chestnut occurs east of the Mississippi Rv., centered in Appalachian regions, but it has been almost eliminated due to the disasterous blight of ca. 1900-1950. It used to be widespread on non-calcareous soils in Ky,, especially on sandstone in the Cumberland Mts. and adjacent rugged hills (Barton 1919). Unverified records mapped here as open dots include historical data of Barton (1919), Gm and B; Gm listed counties throughout western regions, but Barton and B did not. It was never recorded from the Bluegrass region, and it was uncommon to absent in most counties west of the Green Rv. The mysterious place name "Chestnut Grove" in SHEL has been attributed to the former presence of this species (genealogy.com), but there is no real evidence. After the 1930s, C. dentata has largely disappeared, but small sprouts are still scattered at low density and occasionally grow to sapling size. Seed production is very rare, but there have been reports of this since 1980 from ADAI, BARR, BUTL, HARL, LARU and POWE (from KSNPC, American Chestnut Foundation, D. Dourson, E. Hicks and others). A remarkable surviving tree in ADAI is 108 cm dbh but only 14 m tall, with crown spread of 19 m (KDF 2020). However, dentata is often confused with mollisima and some recent reports of fruiting trees on social media (or iNaturalist) have been erroneous (D. Boone, pers. comm.); see notes on identification under mollissima.