A rare grove of 200 American chestnut trees, grown from survivors of the early twentieth-century fungal blight and planted in the 1970s at the former Clements State Tree Nursery in Mason County, West Virginia, is set to be bulldozed in November 2026 for a data center, and conservationists are raising the alarm over the loss of one of the country’s most important remaining stands.The mature trees were propagated from rare wild survivors that withstood the blight, and the orchard now functions as a genetic library and a primary seed repository for efforts to restore the species across North America. Clearing it would remove that source material.The threat comes from the multi-billion-dollar Monarch Compute Campus, a development planned for the area to house high-density data centers for artificial-intelligence processing. The facility requires thousands of acres, and the historic tree nursery sits inside the proposed construction footprint. Forestry advocates are asking the developers and state officials to adjust the building boundaries and permanently protect the grove as the conflict between the infrastructure project and the trees continues.Science and facts💡
A rare grove of 200 American chestnut trees, grown from survivors of the early twentieth-century fungal blight and planted in the 1970s at the former Clements State Tree Nursery in Mason County, West Virginia, is set to be bulldozed in November 2026 for a data center, and conservationists are raising the alarm over the loss of one of the country’s most important remaining stands.The mature trees were propagated from rare wild survivors that withstood the blight, and the orchard now functions as a genetic library and a primary seed repository for efforts to restore the species across North America. Clearing it would remove that source material.The threat comes from the multi-billion-dollar Monarch Compute Campus, a development planned for the area to house high-density data centers for artificial-intelligence processing. The facility requires thousands of acres, and the historic tree nursery sits inside the proposed construction footprint. Forestry advocates are asking the developers and state officials to adjust the building boundaries and permanently protect the grove as the conflict between the infrastructure project and the trees continues.Science and facts💡
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