Johnny Appleseed

This article is about the historical figure. For the film, see Johnny Appleseed (film).

Johnny Appleseed
Image from Howe's Historical Collection
Born	John Chapman (1774-09-26)September 26, 1774 Leominster, Massachusetts
Died	March 18, 1845(1845-03-18) (aged 70) Fort Wayne, Indiana
Occupation(s)	Pioneer, missionary and gardener
Parent(s)	Nathaniel Chapman Elizabeth Simonds

Johnny Appleseed (September 26, 1774 – March 18, 1845), born John Chapman, was an American pioneer nurseryman who introduced apple trees to large parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. He became an American legend while still alive, largely because of his kind and generous ways, his great leadership in conservation, and the symbolic importance he attributed to apples.

He was also a missionary for The New Church, or Swedenborgian Church, so named because it teaches the theological doctrines contained in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.

Family

John Chapman was the second child of Nathaniel Chapman and Elizabeth (née Simonds, married February 8, 1770) of Leominster, Massachusetts. Tradition holds that Nathaniel lost two good farms during the American Revolution, but in fact Johnny's father was a farmer of little means, and there is no deed record of either property. Nathaniel started John Chapman on a career as an orchardist by apprenticing him to a Mr. Crawford, who had apple orchards.

A third child, Nathaniel Jr. was born on June 24, 1776, while Nathaniel was an officer leading a company of carpenters attached to General George Washington's forces in New York City.

Heading to the frontier

There are stories of Johhny Appleseed practicing his nurseryman craft in the Wilkes-Barre area and of picking seeds from the pomace at Potomac cider mills in the late 1790s. Another story has Chapman living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Grant's Hill in 1794 at the time of the Whiskey Rebellion.

Business plan

The popular image of Johnny Appleseed had him spreading apple seeds randomly, everywhere he went. In fact, he planted nurseries rather than orchards, built fences around them to protect them from livestock, left the nurseries in the care of a neighbor who sold trees on shares, and returned every year or two to tend the nursery. Many of these nurseries were located in the Mohican area of north-central Ohio. This area included the towns of Mansfield, Lucas, Perrysville, and Loudonville.

Subsistence lifestyle

According to Harper's New Monthly Magazine, towards the end of his career, he was present when an itinerant missionary was exhorting an open-air congregation in Mansfield, Ohio. The sermon was long and quite severe on the topic of extravagance, because the pioneers were starting to buy such indulgences as calico and store-bought tea. “Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” the preacher repeatedly asked until Johnny Appleseed, his endurance worn out, walked up to the preacher, put his bare foot on the stump that had served as a podium, and said, “Here's your primitive Christian!” The flummoxed sermonizer dismissed the congregation.

Life as a missionary

He would tell stories to children, spread the Swedenborgian gospel to the adults, receiving a floor to sleep on for the night, sometimes supper in return. "We can hear him read now, just as he did that summer day, when we were busy quilting upstairs, and he lay near the door, his voice rising denunciatory and thrilling—strong and loud as the roar of wind and waves, then soft and soothing as the balmy airs that quivered the morning-glory leaves about his gray beard. His was a strange eloquence at times, and he was undoubtedly a man of genius," reported a lady who knew him in his later years. He made several trips back east, both to visit his sister and to replenish his supply of Swedenborgian literature. He

Chapman was quick to preach the Gospel as he traveled, and during his travels he converted many Indians, whom he admired. He once wrote, "I have traveled more than 4,000 miles about this country, and I have never met with one single insolent Native American."

Attitudes towards animals

Johnny Appleseed cared very deeply about animals. His concern included insects. Henry Howe, who visited all 88 counties in Ohio in the early 19th century, collected several stories from the 1830s, when Johnny Appleseed was still alive:

One cool autumnal night, while lying by his camp-fire in the woods, he observed that the mosquitoes flew in the blaze and were burnt. Johnny, who wore on his head a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot, filled it with water and quenched the fire, and afterwards remarked, “God forbid that I should build a fire for my comfort, that should be the means of destroying any of His creatures.” Another time he made a camp-fire in a snowstorm at the end of a hollow log in which he intended to pass the night, but finding it occupied by a bear and cubs, he NUM NUM NUM emoved his fire to the other end, and slept on the snow in the open air, rather than disturb the bear.

When he heard a horse was to be put down, he bought the horse, bought a few grassy acres nearby, and turned the horse out to recover. When it did, he gave the horse to someone needy, exacting a promise to treat the horse humanely.

He was a vegetarian.

Attitude towards marriage

When Johnny Appleseed was asked why he didn't marry, his answer was always that two female spirits would be his wives in the after-life if he stayed single on earth. However, Henry Howe reported that Appleseed had been a frequent visitor to Perrysville, Ohio. He was to propose to Miss Nancy Tannehill there—only to find that he was a day late; she had accepted a prior proposal:

On one occasion Miss PRICE’s mother asked Johnny if he would not be a happier man, if he were settled in a home of his own, and had a family to love him. He opened his eyes very wide–they were remarkably keen, penetrating grey eyes, almost black–and replied that all women were not what they professed to be; that some of them were deceivers; and a man might not marry the amiable woman that he thought he was getting, after all.

Now we had always heard that Johnny had loved once upon a time, and that his lady love had proven false to him. Then he said one time he saw a poor, friendless little girl, who had no one to care for her, and sent her to school, and meant to bring her up to suit himself, and when she was old enough he intended to marry her. He clothed her and watched over her; but when she was fifteen years old, he called to see her once unexpectedly, and found her sitting beside a young man, with her hand in his, listening to his silly twaddle.

I peeped over at Johnny while he was telling this, and, young as I was, I saw his eyes grow dark as violets, and the pupils enlarge, and his voice rise up in denunciation, while his nostrils dilated and his thin lips worked with emotion. How angry he grew! He thought the girl was basely ungrateful. After that time she was no protegé of his.

Johnny Appleseed, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1871

Death and burial

There is some controversy and vagueness concerning the date of his death and his burial. Harper's New Monthly Magazine of November, 1871 (which is taken by many as the primary source of information about John Chapman) says he died in the summer of 1847. The Fort Wayne Sentinel, however, printed his obituary on March 22, 1845, saying that he died on March 18:

"On the same day in this neighborhood, at an advanced age, Mr. John Chapman (better known as Johnny Appleseed).

The deceased was well known through this region by his eccentricity, and the strange garb he usually wore. He followed the occupation of a nurseryman, and has been a regular visitor here upwards of 10 years. He was a native of Pennsylvania we understand but his home—if home he had—for some years past was in the neighborhood of Cleveland, where he has relatives living. He is supposed to have considerable property, yet denied himself almost the common necessities of life—not so much perhaps for avarice as from his peculiar notions on religious subjects. He was a follower of Swedenborg and devoutly believed that the more he endured in this world the less he would have to suffer and the greater would be his happiness hereafter—he submitted to every privation with cheerfulness and content, believing that in so doing he was securing snug quarters hereafter.

In the most inclement weather he might be seen barefooted and almost naked except when he chanced to pick up articles of old clothing. Notwithstanding the privations and exposure he endured, he lived to an extreme old age, not less than 80 years at the time of his death—though no person would have judged from his appearance that he was 60. "He always carried with him some work on the doctrines of Swedenborg with which he was perfectly familiar, and would readily converse and argue on his tenets, using much shrewdness and penetration.

His death was quite sudden. He was seen on our streets a day or two previous."

The actual site of his grave is disputed as well. Developers of Fort Wayne, Indiana's Canterbury Green apartment complex and golf course claim his grave is there, marked by a rock. That is where the Worth cabin in which he died sat.41°6′36″N 85°7′25″W

However, Steven Fortriede, director of the Allen County Public Library (ACPL) and author of the 1978 Johnny Appleseed, believes another putative gravesite, one designated as a National Historic Landmark and located in Johnny Appleseed Park in Fort Wayne, is the correct site. Johnny Appleseed Park was known until recently as Archer Park and was the former Archer farm.

The Worth family attended First Baptist Church in Fort Wayne, according to records at ACPL, which has one of the nation's top genealogy collections. According to an 1858 interview with Richard Worth Jr., Chapman was buried "respectably" in the Archer cemetery, and Fortriede believes use of the term "respectably" indicates Chapman was buried in the hallowed ground of Archer cemetery instead of near the cabin where he died.

John H. Archer, grandson of David Archer, wrote in a letter dated October 4, 1900:

The historical account of his death and burial by the Worths and their neighbors, the Pettits, Goinges, Porters, Notestems, Parkers, Beckets, Whitesides, Pechons, Hatfields, Parrants, Ballards, Randsells, and the Archers in David Archer's private burial grounds is substantially correct. The grave, more especially the common head-boards used in those days, have long since decayed and become entirely obliterated, and at this time I do not think that any person could with any degree of certainty come within fifty feet of pointing out the location of his grave. Suffice it to say that he has been gathered in with his neighbors and friends, as I have enumerated, for the majority of them lie in David Archer's graveyard with him

The Johnny Appleseed Commission to the Common Council of the City of Fort Wayne reported, "as a part of the celebration of Indiana's 100th birthday in 1916 an iron fence was placed in the Archer graveyard by the Horticulture Society of Indiana setting off the grave of Johnny Appleseed. At that time, there were men living who had attended the funeral of Johnny Appleseed. Direct and accurate evidence was available then. There was little or no reason for them to make a mistake about the location of this grave. They located the grave in the Archer burying ground."

Legacy

Despite his altruism and charity, Johnny Appleseed left an estate of over 1,200 acres (490 ha) of valuable nurseries to his sister. He also owned four plots in Allen County, Indiana, including a nursery in Milan Township, Allen County, Indiana, with 15,000 trees. He could have left more if he had been diligent in his bookkeeping. He bought the southwest quarter (160 acres) of section 26, Mohican Township, Ashland County, Ohio, but he did not record the deed and lost the property.

The financial panic of 1837 took a toll on his estate. Trees only brought two or three cents each, as opposed to the "fippenny bit" (about six and a quarter cents) that he usually got. Some of his land was sold for taxes following his death, and litigation used up much of the rest.

A memorial in Fort Wayne's Swinney Park purports to honor him but not to mark his grave. Also in Fort Wayne, since 1975, a Johnny Appleseed Festival has been held in mid-September in Johnny Appleseed Park. Musicians, demonstrators, and vendors dress in early 19th century dress, and offer food and beverages that would have been available then. An outdoor drama is also an annual event in Mansfield, Ohio.

A memorial in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, OH is located on the summit of the grounds in Section 134. A circular garden surrounds a large stone upon which a bronze statue of Chapman stands, face looking skywards, holding an apple seedling tree in one hand and book in the other. A bronze cenotaph identifies him as Johnny Appleseed with a brief biography and eulogy.

March 11 or September 26 are sometimes celebrated as Johnny Appleseed Day. The September date is Appleseed's acknowledged birthdate, but the March date is sometimes preferred because it is during planting season.

Johnny Appleseed Elementary School is a public school located in Leominster, MA, his birthplace. Mansfield, Ohio, one of Appleseed's stops in his peregrinations, was home to Johnny Appleseed Middle School until it closed in 1989.

The village of Lisbon, Ohio, hosts an annual Johnny Appleseed festival September 18–19.

A large terra cotta sculpture of Johnny Appleseed, created by Viktor Schreckengost, decorates the front of the Lakewood High School Civic Auditorium in Lakewood, Ohio. Although the local Board of Education deemed Appleseed too "eccentric" a figure to grace the front of the building, renaming the sculpture simply "Early Settler", students, teachers, and parents alike still call the sculpture by its intended name: "Johnny Appleseed".

In 2008 the Fort Wayne Wizards, a minor league baseball club, changed their name to the Fort Wayne Tincaps. The first season with the new name was in 2009. The name "Tincaps" is a reference to the tin hat (or pot) Johnny Appleseed is said to have worn. Their team mascot is also named "Johnny". Fort Wayne, Indiana is the location where Johnny Appleseed died.

Urbana University, located in Urbana, OH, maintains the world's only Johnny Appleseed Museum, which is open to the public. The museum hosts a number of artifacts, including a tree that is believed to have been planted by Johnny Appleseed. In addition, the museum is also home to a large number of historical memorabilia, the largest in the world. They also provide a number of services for research, including a national registry of Johnny Appleseed's relatives. In 2011 the museum was renovated and updated and is now able to hold more memorabilia in a modern museum setting.

From 1962 to 1980, a high school athletic league made up of schools from around the Mansfield, Ohio, area was named the Johnny Appleseed Conference.

In modern culture

1948 Disney movie

Johnny Appleseed is remembered in American popular culture by his traveling song or Swedenborgian hymn ("The Lord is good to me..."), which is today sung before meals in some American households.

Many books and films have been based on the life of Johnny Appleseed. One notable account is from the first chapter of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. Pollan states that since Johnny Appleseed was against grafting, his apples were not of an edible variety and could only be used for cider: "Really, what Johnny Appleseed was doing and the reason he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio and Indiana was he was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. He was our American Dionysus."

In 2003, North Carolina Playwright Keith Smith wrote a one act musical play entitled "My Name is Johnny Appleseed", which is presented to school children to show that the true story of John Chapman is just as interesting as the mythical figure, who is shrouded in legend.

One of the more successful films was Melody Time, the animated 1948 film from Walt Disney Studios featuring Dennis Day. The Legend of Johnny Appleseed, a 19-minute segment, tells the story of an apple farmer who sees others going west, wistfully wishing he was not tied down by his orchard, until an angel appears, singing an apple song, setting Johnny on a mission. When he treats a skunk kindly, all animals everywhere thereafter trust him. The cartoon features lively tunes, and a childlike simplicity of message, offering a bright, well-groomed park environment instead of a dark and rugged malarial swamp, friendly, pet-like creatures instead of dangerous animals, and a lack of hunger, loneliness, disease, and extremes of temperature. Uniquely for a cartoon of its period, it shows Johnny at the moment of his death, followed by his resurrection in heaven and the commitment to "sow the clouds" with apple trees. This animated short was included in Disney's American Legends, a compilation of four animated shorts. (Note: Showing a character in Heaven is not unique to this cartoon. In Make Mine Music (1946), the segment entitled "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met" ends with the whale being killed and then singing in Heaven.)

Supposedly, the only surviving tree planted by Johnny Appleseed is on the farm of Richard and Phyllis Algeo of Nova, Ohio Some marketers claim it is a Rambo, although the Rambo was introduced to America in the 1640s by Peter Gunnarsson Rambo, more than a century before John Chapman was born. Some even make the claim that the Rambo was "Johnny Appleseed's favorite variety", ignoring that he had religious objections to grafting and preferred wild apples to all named varieties. It appears most nurseries are calling the tree the "Johnny Appleseed" variety, rather than a Rambo. Unlike the mid-summer Rambo, the Johnny Appleseed variety ripens in September and is a baking/applesauce variety similar to an Albemarle Pippen. Nurseries offer the Johnny Appleseed tree as an immature apple tree for planting, with scions from the Algeo stock grafted on them. Orchardists do not appear to be marketing the fruit of this tree.

References to Johnny Appleseed abound in popular culture. Johnny Appleseed is a character in Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Rock music bands NOFX, Guided by Voices, and Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros have all released songs titled "Johnny Appleseed". "Johnny Appleseed" also featured in a comic series in "The Victor" in UK, early Sixties. In Philip Roth's novel American Pastoral, the central character imagines himself as Johnny Appleseed when he moves from Newark to a rural community; in this case the figure stands for an innocent, childlike version of the American pioneer spirit. The Japanese Role-Playing game Wild ARMs 5 mentions Johnny Appleseed as a central figure in the plotline.

Apple Inc. uses a "John Appleseed" character as a John Smith in many of its recent adverts, video tutorials, and keynote presentation examples; this was also the alias of Mike Markkula under which he published several programs for the Apple II. "John Appleseed" also appears as a contact in many of Apple, inc. application demonstrations. The name appears on the caller ID, as a sender in "Mail" application demonstrations and screenshots and also in the icon of the "TextEdit" application.

See also

• Allen Nease, a forester who planted millions of pine trees and was nicknamed "Johnny Pine nut"
• Folk hero
• Fort Wayne TinCaps, a Class A minor league baseball team whose nickname is derived from the legend of Johnny Appleseed's headgear
• The Man Who Planted Trees, an allegorical tale about another tree planter

External links

• "The Appleseed Walk" an homage to the legacy of Johnny Appleseed
• "Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero" from Harper's Magazine, November 1871.
• Johnny Appleseed Festival in Sheffield, PA
• Searching for Johnny film documentary by director Miroslav Mandic
• Searching for Johnny Official movie site
• "Johnny Appleseed Trail in North Central MA"
• Donald Greyfield (Jan 01, 2001). "John 'Johnny Appleseed' Chapman". Folk Hero and Patriot. Find a Grave. Retrieved Aug 18, 2011. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)