Black walnut

Black walnut: what was it used for?

Sargent records that the nuts were valued by the Indians of the Mississippi Basin and in his day were still gathered for domestic use and sold in the markets of western and southern cities, though the kernel, sweet and pleasant while fresh, soon goes rancid; the husks dyed, and the wood, hard, dark brown, and durable in the ground, was shipped to England from Virginia as early as 1610 and furnished the gunstocks of the Civil War. Rafinesque: the bark and the rind of the nuts dye wool brown boiled alone and black with vitriol; the green rind rubbed on tetters and ringworms dispels them, and its decoction is a vermifuge; the vernal sap is sweet and might give sugar; the young green nuts are pickled. Le Page du Pratz, whom Sargent quotes, watched the natives of Louisiana crush the nuts, stir the flour in great vessels of water, and work it with their hands until the shell and the abundant oil rose and the cleaned meat sank, to make a bread.

Black walnut: what does modern science say?

The tree’s notorious effect on what grows beneath it is laid to juglone, a naphthoquinone it makes in its roots by a branch of the phylloquinone pathway, as a 2018 study of its genes and labelled feeding showed; the same study notes the interest in juglone as a natural herbicide. Black walnut is a poison to horses: twelve geldings given an aqueous extract of the wood by stomach tube developed laminitis within eight to twelve hours, four of them severe, with a fall and then a rise in their neutrophils, which has made the extract a standard model of that disease.

Black walnut: what did the older authorities say?

Charles Sprague Sargent

Large black walnuts “practically no longer exist in the American forests”: many were cut and burnt or split into fence-rails when the bottom-lands were cleared, the demand for gunstocks in the War of Secession took more, and for twenty years the agents of lumber-dealers had bought up singly, often at nominal prices, every tree of marketable size. Trees measured near Mount Carmel, Illinois, averaged a hundred and six feet, and one stood a hundred and thirty-one. The nuts, valued by the Indians of the Mississippi Basin, are still gathered and sometimes sold.

C. S. Rafinesque

Of the three walnuts, “J. nigra has the finest wood, hard and brown, bark and rind of the nuts dye wool brown boiled alone, and black with vitriol. Leaves scented, said to shelter from the thunder. Vernal sap sweet, may give sugar. Young green nuts pickled in vinegar, styptic, unwholesome? The green rind rubbed on tetters and ringworms dispels them: their decoction vermifuge and sudorific.”

Huron H. Smith

Among the Ojibwe the butternut is plentiful in the north “while the Black Walnut is not to be found”; they used the butternuts for food and the hulls for a brown dye they could get at any time of year. Among the Forest Potawatomi the black walnut “only reaches the central part of Wisconsin” and “has not been known to Wisconsin Indians for medicine.”