One of America's Last Chestnut Groves Is About to Be Destroyed for a Data Center

A roughly 200-tree grove of American chestnuts at the former Clements State Tree Nursery in Mason County, West Virginia, faces imminent clearing to make room for a planned data-center development, with advocacy groups warning work could start as soon as November 1, 2026. The trees are described by conservationists as blight-surviving specimens planted in the 1970s and carrying rare wild genetics that restoration programs rely on; proponents call the stand a de facto genetic archive worth preserving given the species’ decimation by an early-1900s fungal blight that killed billions and erased the chestnut as an Appalachian keystone. The American Chestnut Foundation has appealed to state officials to intervene.

A factual dispute over property boundaries is central: Project Tamarack’s public materials say the former nursery is not on its site, while advocacy materials link the clearing to Monarch Compute Campus, Nscale, and prospective tenant Anthropic - connections those companies have not confirmed. Reviewers found no parcel maps, ownership records, site plans, permit notices, or environmental-review documents in the public record, and the public reportedly first learned of the threat via a conservation newsletter. Advocates demand release of site maps, documentation, and consultation with the American Chestnut Foundation and West Virginia Division of Forestry before any clearing proceeds, framing the issue as a transparency and land-use review failure amid rapid AI-driven data-center expansion.