The toasty scent of roasting chestnuts defined my holiday vacations. As a child, I'd go with my mom on the train from New Jersey to window-shop and see the tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City.

And now a checkup of sorts on the American chestnut, a tree that was a big part of forests in the eastern United States until 1904, when a fungus from Asia started killing them. Since the 1920s, ...

Wearing a pair of big leather boots, Conor Dolan, 14, tramps through the fallen leaves of chestnut trees. The time-smoothed boots belong to his dad, who planted these chestnuts 12 years ago. But the ...