There are three things that most people think of when American beech, Fagus grandifolia, is mentioned and they are names carved in trees, Beechnut chewing gum, and Beechnut tobacco. The name carving is due to the smooth grey bark that can preserve the names for centuries. This has now become an act of vandalism that I have little tolerance for it including banning somebody from ever going hiking with me again because I would rather see a tree cut down or girdled than covered with graffiti and similarly for rocks as places such as at the Walls of Jericho where Indian pictographs/petroglyphs have reportedly been destroyed by ignoramuses scratching their names in the most remote place they reached. The Beechnut product references usually draw questions of the nuts being used as flavoring similar to hazelnut. I seriously doubt it would be practical due to the small size, high proportion of faulty/empty nuts, and sporadic annual production. I’ve even seen claims of toxicity, but the likelihood of ingesting harmful quantities is inconceivable when considering the aforementioned frustrations, besides just the process from collecting through shelling the nuts is probably more dangerous. If anybody is that concerned about such a minor toxin then roast the nuts for example nobody eats raw cashews because the effect would the same as eating a salad of poison ivy, Toxicodendron radicans, which is in the same family as cashews. If the bark alone is not enough to identify beech then the long pointed buds and/or leaves with parallel secondary veins terminating at prominent teeth should suffice in any season because dead brown leaves often persist on the lower branches throughout winter. The nuts usually come two to a bur that has relatively soft spines, and the nuts are shaped like three sided pyramids. The second loudest, yet most uninformed due overconfidence, deliberate tooth crunch on an eatable item that I have ever heard was on an unshelled beechnut; the biggest was on a soft shell crawdad before any of us knew that they formed a gastrolith of calcium carbonate to be used for hardening the new shell after molting, while nearly everything else was accidental due to a foreign objects such sand and shells of eggs or walnuts. Beech trees seem difficult to transplant, but part of this may be their tolerance of shade as both seedlings and sapling considering how they seem to wither in full sun. This tolerance also makes them a likely climax species in forest succession.