For decades, the decline of the American chestnut was told as a simple story: an imported fungus was detected in New York in 1904 and, within roughly fifty years, killed an estimated four billion trees. Forest ecologist Mara Whitcomb argues that this account, while accurate about the fungus, obscures what happened next. Chestnuts had been a dominant canopy species across much of the Appalachians, and their disappearance did not leave the forest empty; oaks and hickories expanded into the gaps, altering which animals could find food in autumn and how quickly fallen leaves decomposed. To Whitcomb, then, the blight is better understood not as a single, finished loss but as the starting point of a reorganization whose effects are still unfolding.