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Learn more about how Paula Corbin Kahn creates unique jewelry pieces with chinquapins.
Growing up in Ellijay, on the outskirts of Franklin, North Carolina, Paula Corbin Kahn loved to play with chinquapins. She acquired that love from her father, Wilford Corbin, a schoolteacher and Christmas tree farmer.
“He had an interest in the American chestnut. Then he got interested in bringing chinquapins out of the woods and into the edge of the pasture,” Kahn says. “He found that they did well and were less susceptible to the blight.”
Today, Kahn makes jewelry from chinquapins “to raise awareness,” she says. “There was a lot being done for the chestnut. It’s smaller than the chestnut, but it’s in the same family as the American chestnut.”
Yet, as Kahn puts it, younger generations do not have an “inkling” of how popular the chinquapin nut once was: “When I was a little, we used to string them and wear them to school as necklaces,” says Kahn, 60. “I always strung them with a thread and needle. Then I just started making earrings and wearing them and then giving them as gifts.”
Today, Kahn fashions her chinquapin creations with help from her husband, Rob, and her 90-year-old father, who relocated near the Kahns’ farm, just south of Abingdon, Virginia. There, the Kahns grow several chinquapin trees, stretching about 20 feet tall. All stem from the roots of her father’s former farm near Franklin.
Wilford Corbin says he took an interest in wild-grown chinquapins as early as the 1960s in North Carolina. “I gathered those nuts, and I took them to town like old-timers used to do,” he says. “The nuts were what I was after. The chinquapins really are sweeter nuts than the American chestnuts.”
The Kahns use a bead-sized nut—or chinquapin—in a prickly burr. “Then you boil the Chinquapins to kill any worms that may exist,” Paula Kahn says. “You dry them in an attic under a screen. Then you drill them one at a time to make a bead.”
Kahn sells her jewelry at Franklin’s Mossy Rock; Heartwood in Abingdon; and at the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville.
