Johnny Appleseed

It’s hard to sift through the writings about Johnny Appleseed because so much has been embellished and spun into tall stories to fit folklore rather than the actual man. We do know a little. He was born in Massachusetts and given the name Jonathan Chapman in 1774. His mother is said to have died in 1776 while his father served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

According to some stories, he left home in his late teens. In many of these stories, he talked his 11-year-old little brother into leaving to go westward until the two bizarrely crossed paths with their family in Ohio where their father bought a homestead.

Along his wandering journeys, Chapman took an apprenticeship with an orchard grower. At some point, his nursery skills and hoboism merged. Some called him a missionary–and he indeed did spread the word and literature for the New Church also known as Swedenborgianism, but the period of Champman’s religiosity is hard to pinpoint. The church was established around the 1780s in England and based on the writings of Lutheran theologian Emanuel Swedenborg which landed Swedenborg with a heresy trial in Sweden. Swedenborgianism, like other groups of the time, had a trendy occultist or spiritualist streak to it. In the US the church wasn’t established until 1817. That’s not to say Chapman wasn’t a very early convert–just that it’s hard to say when his religion came into the mix.

In stories most of us were raised with, there seem to be no locals that found him odd. Numerous stories are up for debate, such as him wearing a tin pot as a hat that he would eat out of, or him not wearing shoes even in the winter. Some also say that he would vanish into the woods for months at a time like some old-timey version of Ted Kaczynski. Additionally, he was known to walk around half-naked while preaching his religion and conversing with wild animals. There’s even an account from a man who had known Appleseed as a child who talked of a man who sometimes slept on his family’s floor and seemed especially preoccupied with his little sister. This isn’t to suggest he was a pedophile, but just to point out it’s a bit weird. He was a bit weird even if it’s not all fact.

It’s possible that storytellers made him more palatable for the sake of the myth. In reality, though, he probably freaked some out despite his offering of apple trees.

There have been some that have suggested that the Swedenborgian teaching considered grafting of trees as unnatural and that’s why Chapman raised the trees from seed, but that probably isn’t the case as William Kerrigan pointed out in his book Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History. Why is this important? Apple trees from seed usually don’t grow into the apples we eat. More often than not, the trees revert to their wild nature. The fruit they bear is crabapple and those tend to be best suited for vinegar & a low-proof booze.

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Palin infers that the prospect of hooch was the reason why so many welcomed Chapman into their homes and towns from Pennsylvania to Kentucky. It could certainly be part of it but there is evidence that many settlers in certain areas were asked to grow fruit trees as a part of their homestead. If settlers planted a certain amount of trees on a plot of land it was then their land.

Some say Chapman owned land and also had family members he could probably rely on, but it seems he never stayed put. Chapman wandered from settlement to settlement, homestead to homestead, planting and providing apple trees mostly in exchange for food scraps and a floor to sleep on.

He died, most likely shoe-less, in 1845 in Indiana at the age of 71 from pneumonia.

To be honest, Chapman doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in American agriculture, or if he did it was to some of the early American settlers in the expansion West. In The Botany of Desire Pollin credits Chapman by saying that through growing and spreading of his Chapman helped to acclimate apple trees to North America and produced the starts of American apple varieties. It’s possible yet it’s hard to find real documentation that fully backs this up. Apples, specifically Malus coronia commonly known as the sweet crabapple, existed in America before white settlers. The Spanish were said to have introduced European apples to several places in the Americas starting in the 1500s. And the first apple orchard was created in Boston by Reverend William Blaxton in the mid-1600s well over 100 years before Chapman’s birth.

Johnny Appleseed is for the most part a whitewashed story for primary school reading and geography lessons. In reality, though, he was a weirdo but a weirdo that left a mark on a young country which in turn made him a folk hero. Many American folk stories are to some extent reinventions of older tales–Aesop’s fable about an honest woodcutter became George Washington and a cherry tree. Nathan Hale sounds close to William Wallace. John Chapman, a zealous man in the wilderness with no worldly possessions is a Francis of Assisi figure, hand-feeding birds and leaving apple trees on his odyssey. America needed martyrs, heroes, and saints– so America rebranded the old.