Johnny Appleseed

Chapman was born on September 26, 1774, in Leominster, Province of Massachusetts Bay, the second child of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Chapman (née Simonds, married February 8, 1770). His birthplace has a granite marker, and the street is now called Johnny Appleseed Lane. Chapman's mother Elizabeth died in 1776, shortly after giving birth to her second son Nathaniel Jr., who died a few days later. In 1780, his father Nathaniel returned to Longmeadow, Massachusetts where he married Lucy Cooley. Author Rosella Rice states, "Johnny had one sister, Persis Broom, of Indiana. She was not at all like him; a very ordinary woman, talkative, and free in her frequent, 'says she's' and 'says I's.'" According to some accounts, 18-year-old John persuaded his 11-year-old half-brother Nathaniel Cooley Chapman to go west with him in 1792. The duo apparently lived a nomadic life until their father brought his large family west in 1805 and met up with them in Ohio. Nathaniel decided to stay and help their father farm the land. Shortly after the brothers parted ways, John began his apprenticeship as an orchardist under a Mr. Crawford who grew apples, thus inspiring Chapman's life journey of planting apple trees. In 1800 at age 26, Chapman was in Licking River, Ohio. His first orchard was on the farm of Isaac Stadden in Licking County. In 1806, he embarked upon a canoe voyage down the Ohio, Muskingum, and Walhonding Rivers, using two canoes lashed together to transport himself and his seeds. ==Life==

There are stories of Johnny Appleseed practicing his nurseryman craft in the area of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and of picking seeds from the pomace at Potomac River cider mills in the late 1790s. The popular image is of Johnny Appleseed spreading apple seeds randomly everywhere he went. In fact, he planted nurseries rather than orchards, built fences around them to protect them from livestock and wildlife, left the nurseries in the care of a neighbor who sold trees on shares, and returned every year or two to tend the nursery. He planted his first nursery on the bank of Brokenstraw Creek, south of Warren, Pennsylvania. Next, he seems to have moved to Venango County, along the shore of French Creek, but many of these nurseries were in the Mohican River area of north-central Ohio. This area included the towns of Mansfield, Lisbon, Lucas, Perrysville and Loudonville. In 1817, a bulletin of the Church of New Jerusalem printed in Manchester, England was the first to publish a written report about Chapman. It described a missionary who traveled around the West to sow apple seeds and pass out books of The New Church. In 1819, Chapman was nearly killed in an accident in Ohio. One morning, he was picking his crops in a tree when he fell and caught his neck in the fork of the branches. Shortly after he fell, eight year-old John White found him struggling. White cut the tree down, saving Chapman's life. In 1822, the first known use of "John Appleseed" was written in a letter from a member of the New Church. Author Rosella Rice met Chapman in his later years, and she stated in the 1863 History of Ashland County, Ohio:His personal appearance was as singular as his character. He was a small, "chunked" man, quick and restless in his motions and conversation; his beard, though not long, was unshaven, and his hair was long and dark, and his eye black and sparkling. He lived the roughest life, and often slept in the woods. His clothing was mostly old, being generally given to him in exchange for apple-trees. He went bare-footed, and often traveled miles through the snow in that way.... [He] wore on his head a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot. Historian Paul Aron wrote, "Chapman was actually a successful businessman. He bought many of the parcels of land on which he planted his seeds and ultimately accumulated about twelve hundred acres across three states.... He wore pauper's clothing by choice and not out of necessity." Chapman cared deeply about animals, including insects. Henry Howe visited all the counties in Ohio in the early nineteenth century and 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 burned. 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 allegedly made a camp-fire in a snowstorm at the end of a hollow log in which he intended to pass the night, but he found it occupied by a bear and cubs, so he removed his fire to the other end and slept on the snow in the open air, rather than disturb the bear. In a story collected by Eric Braun, he had a pet wolf that had started following him after he healed its injured leg. According to another story, he heard that a horse was to be put down, so he bought the horse, bought a few grassy acres nearby, and turned it out to recover. When it did, he gave the horse to someone needy, exacting a promise to treat it humanely. More controversially, he also planted dogfennel during his travels, believing that it was a useful medicinal herb. Although it is native to the southern and eastern United States, it spreads aggressively and can be difficult to manage. Chapman chose not to marry, as he believed that he would find his soulmate in Heaven if she did not appear to him on Earth. ==Death==

Different dates are listed for his death. ''Harper's New Monthly Magazine'' of November 1871 was apparently incorrect in saying that he died in mid-1847, though this is taken by many as the primary source of information about John Chapman. Rosella Rice wrote in 1863: Steven Fortriede, director of the Allen County Public Library (ACPL) and author of the 1978 Johnny Appleseed, believes that another gravesite is the correct site, in Johnny Appleseed Park in Fort Wayne. Johnny Appleseed Park is a Fort Wayne city park that adjoins Archer Park, an Allen County park. Archer Park is the site of John Chapman's grave marker and used to be a part of the Archer family farm. The Worth family attended First Baptist Church in Fort Wayne, according to records at ACPL. dated October 4, 1900: In 1934, a committee of the Johnny Appleseed Commission Council of the City of Fort Wayne reported, "[A]s 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==

Johnny Appleseed left an estate of over of valuable nurseries to his sister. He also owned four plots in Allen County, Indiana, including a nursery in Milan Township with 15,000 trees, He bought the southwest quarter () of section 26, Mohican Township, Ashland County, Ohio, but did not record the deed and lost the property. The financial panic of 1837 took a toll on his estate. Some of his land was sold to pay taxes following his death, and litigation used up much of the rest. Gail Kubik composed a work for bass, chorus and orchestra called In Praise of Johnny Appleseed; this work was also based on the eponymous Vachel Lindsay poem, and entered into the same 1942 National Federation of Music Clubs composition competition as Kettering's work. Similar festivals are held in Sheffield, PA; Apple Creek, OH; Crystal Lake, IL; Lisbon, OH; and Paradise, CA. From 1962 to 1980, a high school athletic league made up of schools from around the Mansfield, Ohio, area used the name the "Johnny Appleseed Conference". In 1966, the Post Office Department issued a five-cent stamp commemorating Johnny Appleseed. A bronze statue of Chapman sits on a bench on Jefferson Boulevard in Fort Wayne, Indiana, offering a red apple to visitors who sit beside him. Unveiled in 2020, the sculpture was created by Gary Tillery. March 11 and 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 falls during planting season. Johnny Appleseed Elementary School is a public school in Leominster, Massachusetts, his birthplace. Mansfield, Ohio, one of Appleseed's stops in his peregrinations, was home to Johnny Appleseed Middle School until it closed in 1989. In 1984, Jill and Michael Gallina published a biographical musical, Johnny Appleseed. In 2016, John Chapman appeared in Tracy Chevalier's historical fiction novel At the Edge of the Orchard. A large terracotta sculpture of Johnny Appleseed, created by Viktor Schreckengost (1906–2008), adorns 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". Urbana University in Urbana, Ohio, maintains one of two Johnny Appleseed museums in the world, which is open to the public. The Johnny Appleseed Educational Center and Museum hosts a number of artifacts, as well as trees that are descended from the same trees originally planted by Johnny Appleseed. 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. The educational center and museum was founded on the belief that those who have the opportunity to study the life of Johnny Appleseed will share his appreciation of education, his country, the environment, peace, moral integrity, and leadership. Supposedly, the only surviving tree planted by Johnny Appleseed grows on the farm of Richard and Phyllis Algeo of Nova, Ohio. Some marketers claim that it is a Rambo; some even make the claim that the Rambo was "Johnny Appleseed's favorite variety", ignoring the fact that he had religious objections to grafting and preferred wild apples to all named varieties. It appears that 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 Pippin. 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. == Hard cider ==

Chapman planted his apples by seed, not grafting, but without grafting, only about one in a hundred seedlings will yield an apple that is edible as a fruit. According to Henry David Thoreau, an apple grown from seed tastes "sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a jay scream." But apples from seed are perfectly fine for making hard cider, and in the early part of the nineteenth century, there was a demand for hard cider—Ohioans ages fifteen and over drank, on average, thirty gallons of hard cider per year (10.52 ounces per day). Author Michael Pollan believes that since Chapman was against grafting and thus virtually all his apples were not edible and could be used only 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." ==See also==