Johnny Appleseed

Johnny Appleseed (aka John Chapman, 26 September 1774 – 18 March 1845) is an iconic figure in American history and folklore.

In the food world, he is largely associated with apples.

As a legendary figure, he is a somewhat rare one in that almost all of the seemingly-exaggerated aspects recounted about him genuinely seem to be true. And what’s more, there are a few that popular mythology hasn’t even picked up on.

See also: Johnny Appleseed Day, Apples, Cider, Cider Apples, Hot Mulled Cider Day, World Cider Day

The legacy of Johnny Appleseed

Myth credits Johnny with planting apple trees randomly throughout the United States, while walking barefoot and wearing a coffee sack. What he actually did was create nurseries of apples trees in Ohio, from whence he distributed the trees for sale, trade or as gifts if the customers could afford neither.

“When his trees were grown he sold them to such pioneers as could afford to pay for them, and gave them to those that could not.” ^[1]Stephens, Henry. Johnny Appleseed: A Chat with a Man Who Knew The Pioneer Prophet. Leavenworth, Kansas: The Leavenworth Weekly Times. Thursday, 16 August 1888. Page 6, col. 1.

As for his mode of dress, those parts of the myth appear to be true and he appears to have been an eccentric to rival the early desert hermits of early Christianity:

“He was one of the queerest cranks of pioneer history.” ^[2]Stephens, Henry. Johnny Appleseed: A Chat with a Man Who Knew The Pioneer Prophet. Leavenworth, Kansas: The Leavenworth Weekly Times. Thursday, 16 August 1888. Page 6, col. 1.

Appleseed is associated not just with apples, but also with claiming and taming the wilderness for settlement by American settlers:

“And so Johnny Appleseed was both sort of this person who was civilizing the wildernesses. I mean he’s getting rid of the wild pine trees that were out there and replacing them with horticulture, with fruit trees. And also at the same time, he’s making a living for himself… And all those things sort of built into the myth of this Frontier Guy, Johnny Appleseed with a pot on his head and he’s a little half-crazy, but he’s out doing good things to sort of civilize the nation. So Johnny Appleseed is significant as a historical figure and he’s also significant as a mystical figure, or a mythical figure because it wraps in the American way of thinking about itself, that Americans are sort of individualists, that they are always sort of seeking for the Frontier, and when they get on the Frontier they want to improve it, they want to make it better, they want to spread the culture of America, in this case the culture of apples and orchards, across the United States. So Johnny Appleseed resonates for all those reasons, and he continues to resonate today… I can’t think of any other country in the world that has, as one of its mythical heroes, somebody who grew fruit.” — Gary Daynes, Brigham Young University History ^[3]Gary Daynes, Brigham Young University History. In interview with April Chabries. Brigham Young University Campus. February 2002. Accessed September 2021 at https://net.lib.byu.edu/scm/fruitexhibit/Orchards/DaynesGary.pdf

His prime years of operation appear to have approximately been 1801 until his death in 1845:

“He began his work in Pennsylvania during the second year of Thomas Jefferson’s vice presidency and moved into Ohio and Indiana as Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase was pushing the frontier farther west… At the same time that Chapman was moving ahead of the frontier, he continued to return to many of his former plantings, so he was simultaneously managing nurseries over a wide geographic area on land he sometimes owned and sometimes just used. At one time he ‘held rights to hundreds of acres of land in Ohio and later in Indiana.'” ^[4]Samuels, Gayle Brandon. Enduring Roots. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 1999. Page 58.

What may be hard for us to understand these days is that Chapman may have regarded his distribution of apple trees as a sideline to his main calling, that of being a missionary for the Swedenborgian religion he followed.

Johnny Appleseed’s Genealogy

Johnny was the second child of Nathaniel Chapman and Elizabeth (née Sidmonds) Chapman, who married at Leominster, Massachusetts on 8 February 1770.

Their first child was a girl, named Elizabeth.

Johnny was born on 26 September 1774 and baptised “John Chapman” in a Congregational Church on 25 June 1775.

His mother, Elizabeth, died in 1776, possibly of tuberculosis, shortly after giving birth to her third child in 1776. The third child reportedly died 2 weeks after his mother. ^[5]John Chapman – Early American pioneer nurseryman and Swedenborgian Missionary. The Swedenborgian Church of North America. Accessed September 2021 at https://swedenborg.org/famous-swedenborgians/john-chapman

In 1780, John’s father, Nathaniel Sr., remarried to a Lucy Cooley. The two would go on to have many children. In 1801, they moved west to Ohio.

“It is a fact that his father, who was twice married, located at Marietta, Ohio, in 1801. The family consisted of John (Johnny Appleseed), Lucky, Patty, Nathaniel, Perley, Abner (a mute), Mary, Jonathan (a mute), Davis and Sally. Subsequently the family moved to Duck Creek, where the father died and is now buried.” — Hahn, George U. A Unique Character. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh Dispatch. Sunday, 3 May 1891. Page 10, col. 6. (Note: This list omits Elizabeth).

Many writers will refer to Johnny’s real name as Jonathan, but that was the name of a brother: his name was indeed John.

A Harper’s Magazine which achieved nation-wide distribution carried the mistaken name of “Jonathan”:

“The pioneers of Western Virginia and of the state of Ohio were familiar with Johnny Appleseed, whose true name was John Chapman, not Jonathan, as stated in a recent article in Harper’s monthly periodical.” — Another Article On Johnny Appleseed (From the Mansfield Shield and Banner). In: Bucyrus, Ohio: Telegraph-Forum. Saturday, 16 December 1871. Page 2, col. 2.

Someone who actually knew Johnny Appleseed supplied further evidence as to his actual name:

“Mr. Haley introduces Johnny Appleseed as having the true patronymic of Jonathan Chapman, in which he is mistaken. His name was John Chapman, as I find in looking over the papers of his estate which was settled in the Probate Court of this county. For instance, two notes were filed against his estate. One dated at Franklin, supposed to be on the Great Miami River, Ohio, February, 1804, payable to Nathaniel Chapman, one year after said date, for $100 – “in apple trees or land”. The other $100 payable to some minor children named Rudde, of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when they became of age, both of which were signed by John Chapman. And the better evidence of his name was to be found in the purchases of land which he made in this county, as well as in Adams and Jay counties. The muniments of title, which he held, were in the name of John Chapman.” — Dawson, John W. Johnny Appleseed – Further Particulars. Defiance, Ohio: Defiance Democrat. Saturday, 23 December 1871. Page 3, col. 5.

John died at the age 71, either of pneumonia or typhoid, after a two-week illness on 18 March 1845. ^[6]”On March 18, 1845, he died of pneumonia in the home of his Richmond County friend, William Worth, and was buried not far from Ft. Wayne.” John Chapman – Early American pioneer nurseryman and Swedenborgian Missionary. The Swedenborgian Church of North America. Accessed September 2021 at https://swedenborg.org/famous-swedenborgians/john-chapman/ ^[7]”Typhoid fever raged, and he died in Indiana at the age of 72.” Stephens, Henry. Johnny Appleseed: A Chat with a Man Who Knew The Pioneer Prophet. Leavenworth, Kansas: The Leavenworth Weekly Times. Thursday, 16 August 1888. Page 6, col. 1.

He was laid to rest in a burying ground belonging to the Archer Family, which is now part of what is known as Johnny Appleseed Park. His gravesite has been preserved, marked, and enclosed with a low fence there:

“Johnny Appleseed died on 11 March, 1845, at the house of William Worth, in St. Joseph Township, Allen County, Indiana, on the land now owned by Jesse Cole, on the feeder canal, and was buried in a reasonable time thereafter, at the family burying ground set apart by David Archer, deceased, now owned by Mr. Emmanuel Rudisill and may be seen by the passer up the towing path of the feeder, occupying a beautiful natural mound. At the east side of this mound, near its foot, Johnny Appleseed was buried, and a stone was then put up to mark the spot, by our townsman, Samuel L Flutter, who attended his dying hours, dressed his body, laid it out and made his coffin.” — Dawson, John W. Johnny Appleseed – Further Particulars. Defiance, Ohio: Defiance Democrat. Saturday, 23 December 1871. Page 3, col. 5.

Johnny Appleseed and religion

John Chapman was a fervent follower of the religious teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist and mystic who believed that God was revealing to him the next phase of Christianity. Shortly after his death a new church, called “The New Church”, was founded, which regarded his writings as divinely inspired.

Swedenborgianism arrived in Philadelphia from England in the 1780s. ^[8]Early History in America. The Swedenborgian Church of North America. Accessed September 2021 at https://swedenborg.org/beliefs/history/early-history-in-america/

Chapman was an official minister and missionary of that church (variously called the New Church, the Church of the New Jerusalem, etc.):

“John Chapman was a regularly constituted Minister of the Church of the New Jerusalem according to the revelations of Emanuel Swedenborg. He was also a constituted Missionary of that faith under the authority of the regular association of that faith in the City of Boston, Mass. The writer has seen and examined his credentials as to the latter of these.” — Coffinberry, C.S. Another Article On Johnny Appleseed (From the Mansfield Shield and Banner). In: Bucyrus, Ohio: Telegraph-Forum. Saturday, 16 December 1871. Page 2, col. 2.

Like the founder of the Swedenborg church, Chapman also claimed to speak with ethereal beings:

“He was a most earnest disciple of the faith taught by Emanuel Swedenborg, and himself claimed to have frequent conversations with angels and spirits…” ^[9]W.D. Haley. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

Writers about Chapman frequently note that he made trips back east to Pennsylannia to get apple seed from cider mills. After a few years though, he would probably have been able to get seed from the trees he himself had planted, without making such a long journey back east. And indeed at times he was reported to have done so. But those trips back east served a dual purpose: they allowed him to replenish his stock of Swedenborgian tracts to bring back to Ohio and distribute.

“…In the purchase of books and tracts treating on this system of religion he expended much of his revenue…” ^[10]Old Johnny Appleseed. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Intelligencer Journal. Wednesday, 29 January 1879, Page 1, col. 4.

When he ran short, he had a unique method of stretching them out until his next trip back east:

“He was a most earnest disciple of the faith taught by Emanuel Swedenborg, and himself claimed to have frequent conversations with angels and spirits… He entertained a profound reverence for the revelations of the Swedish seer, and always carried a few old volumes with him. These he was very anxious should be read by everyone, and he was probably not only the first colporteur in the wilderness of Ohio, but as he had no tract society to furnish him supplies, he certainly devised an original method of multiplying one book into a number. He divided his books into several pieces, leaving a portion at a log-cabin, and on a subsequent visit furnishing another fragment, and continuing this process as diligently as though the work had been published in serial numbers. By this plan he was enabled to furnish reading for several people at the same time, and out of one book; but it must have been a difficult undertaking for some nearly illiterate backwoodsman to endeavor to comprehend Swedenborg by a backward course of reading, when his first installment happened to be the last fraction of the volume… ^[11]W.D. Haley. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

One writer he knew Chapman said “he never affected the style or language of the sacred scriptures. His language was plain, simple and graphic.” ^[12]Coffinberry, C.S. Another Article On Johnny Appleseed (From the Mansfield Shield and Banner). In: Bucyrus, Ohio: Telegraph-Forum. Saturday, 16 December 1871. Page 2, col. 2.

Another writer, though, recorded a witness saying that Chapman used florid, biblical language even when delivering word of an imminent Indian attack:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, and he hath anointed me to blow the trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for, behold, the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring flame followeth after them.” ^[13]W.D. Haley. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

He had great faith in the writings of Swedenborg:

“Johnny’s faith in Swedenborg’s works was so reverential as almost to be superstitious. He was once asked if, in travelling barefooted through forests abounding with venomous reptiles, he was not afraid of being bitten. With his peculiar smile, he took his book from his bosom, and said, “This book is an available protection against all danger here and here after.” ^[14]W.D. Haley. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

Accounts of his life from various witnesses state that when staying at someone’s home, he repaid their kindness by reading religious texts aloud to them at length:

“It was his custom, when he had been welcomed to some hospitable log-house after a very day of journeying, to lie down on the puncheon floor, and, after inquiring if his auditors would hear “some news right fresh from Heaven”, produce his few tattered books, amongst which would be a New Testament, and read and expound..” ^[15]W.D. Haley. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

A recurring motive in Johnny Appleseed stories is the tale of his encounter or encounters with an itinerant missionary (Paine / Payne) who called into question Appleseed’s devoutness. In the end, said missionary got his come-uppance from an encounter with hostile First Nation’s people, who severed his head from his body, and carried on a pole as a trophy.

Johnny Appleseed and grafting

In 1846, a writer recorded that to make space for the apple trees to grow, Chapman would kill off the existing trees in that space by girdling:

“He would clear a few rods of ground in some open part of the forest, girdle the trees standing upon it, surround it with a brush fence, and plant his apple seed.” — Johnny Appleseed. In: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania: The Wilkes Barre Advocate. 3 June 1846. Page 1, col. 5.

Girdling involves cutting off or otherwise removing a wide circle of bark all around the trunk of a tree. Without this protection, the tree will slowly die.

Chapman’s method of using girdling to clear space for his apple trees was attested by several other writers as well. Girdling offers a less-labour intensive way of killing trees, compared to felling them, and would have been well-suited suited to the one-man operation that Chapman preferred.

In between the girdled, dying trees, John Chapman planted his apple trees from seed. As the canopy of the other trees died back, light would become available for his apple tree seedlings. In this way, Chapman would clear patches of natural growth and claim it for the advancing waves of settler civilization.

The issue with planting apple trees from seed is that growers since the dawn of pomology have known that apples do not grow true to seed. (CooksInfo is aware of only one very rare exception out of over 7,500 types of apples: Fameuse Apples reputedly often grow true to seed.) If you plant, say, a Rambo Apple seed, you will not get a Rambo Apple tree. Instead, you will get a wildly different apple bearing no relation to the parent fruit and whose quality is almost certainly going to be abysmal:

“Apples do not come true from seed. Actually about 1 in every 80,000 apple trees grown from seed has quality factors good enough to even be considered for evaluation. Most of the time you end up with a tree with small or inferior fruit and its nothing at all like the parent.” — Hay, Paul C. Apples & Most Fruit Are Not True to Seed. University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension Service. 2012. Accessed September 2021.

Trying to grow a useful apple from a seed is like rolling the dice with the odds of the universe incredibly stacked against you. It is almost guaranteed that the fruit you will get will be small and mean, having a taste that is incredibly bitter, harsh and sour. As well, the tree itself may not be suitable to a harsh winter, or a hot and humid summer, or, even if it passed though those durability tests, it might bloom too early for the region it had been planted in, making it susceptible to late-spring frosts causing loss of crop.

It is for this reason that apple growers, from time immemorial, have propagated apple trees by grafting. In simple terms, grafting is joining two plants together by splicing.

But, Chapman is recorded as having said he was opposed to grafting. The reason he gave, apparently, is that he thought trees were sentient beings, and that grafting (as well as pruning) injured them:

“Next to his advocacy of his peculiar religious ideas, his enthusiasm for the cultivation of apple trees in what he termed, “the only proper way” — that is, from the seed — was the absorbing object of his life… He denounced as absolute wickedness all devices of pruning and grafting, and would speak of the act of cutting a tree as if it were a cruelty inflicted upon a sentient being.” — Haley, W.D. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

Some writers speculate that his grafting beliefs stemmed from his religious beliefs:

“…it seems apples were bound up with [his] religion. As regards the issue of grafting…around 1801 Chapman is credited with the following remark during a conversation about grafting: ‘They can improve the apple in that way but that is only a device of man, and it is wicked to cut up trees that way. The correct method is to select good seeds and plant them in good ground and God only can improve the apple.’ ^[16]Samuels, Gayle Brandon. Enduring Roots. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 1999. Page 60.

It’s at this point, though, that the ostensible reason Chapman gave for not practising apple tree propagation through the work of grafting — religious convictions preventing him from inflicting pain on a sentient tree — run smack into the fact of how he cleared space for his seedling trees, which was by inflicting slow, lingering (and following his reasoning, painful) deaths on other trees.

It’s possible that however he presented his anti-grafting reasoning to others, it also just happened to be a handy justification for his resorting to a less-than desirable way of propagating apples, which didn’t involve the labour, skill, training or time that careful grafting does.

In fact, he gave up one of his earliest orchards in Ohio, on the eastern border of Ohio in Belmont County, owing to competition from professional nursery people such as Jake Nissley who practised grafting to offer far superior products to customers. ^[17]Stratton House Inn. The Belmont Apple and Johnny Appleseed. Retrieved September 2021 from http://strattonhouse.com/index.php?section=history&content=johnny_appleseed.

So, we face the question: did Chapman really believe that grafting would hurt trees, or, did he just choose to believe it because it suited his business model?

The issue with apples grown from seed

Chapman procured some of his apple seed from cider mills:

“Chapman would typically develop a nursery or two on the banks of a river, leave a designated manager in charge as his young trees matured, and move on with another load of seeds for the next series of plantings. When his supplies were depleted, he would return to the cider mills of western Pennsylvania, where he would sort through back door piles of discard pomace and prepare for the next foray into the wilderness.” ^[18]Pilkington, Steve. A is for Apple, B is for Billings and C is for Chapman. In: Zager, Daniel (ed). Music and Theology: Essays in Honor of Robin A. Leaver. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2007. Page 195.

It’s not clear if Chapman paid the mill owners something for the seed, or if they let him scavenge it for free.

Modern-day food historians surmise that settlers wouldn’t care that the resulting apples weren’t food-quality: that instead, they wanted the apples only to make cider — as in hard, alcoholic apple cider:

“The chief purpose of the colonial fruit garden was not to grow fruit for the table, but rather to secure a supply of “most excellent and comfortable drinks”—cider from apples, perry from pears, mobby and brandy from peaches. In 1676, Thomas Glover, visiting from England, noted “fair and large orchards” in the New World, “bearing all sorts of English apples… of which they make great store of cider.” — Hensley, Tim. A Curious Tale: The Apple in North America. Brooklyn Botanic Garden. 2 June 2005. Accessed September 2021 at https://www.bbg.org/gardening/article/the_apple_in_north_america

This is frequently accompanied by an off-hand reference to the same myth that plagues writing about Medieval Food, which is that no one drank water for fear of it.

Some go so far as to assert that before Prohibition in the United States, apples were seldom used for food:

“Knowing that the thousands of trees on homesteader’s lands were mostly filled with Johnny’s wild apples rather than the delicious grafted varieties, this charming tale becomes less about fresh fruit in autumn and more about hard cider in winter. For, in reality, up until Prohibition most apples were not something that people ate but drink.” ^[19]Pilkington, Steve. A is for Apple, B is for Billings and C is for Chapman. In: Zager, Daniel (ed). Music and Theology: Essays in Honor of Robin A. Leaver. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2007. Page 198.

This would be news of course to the millennia of people before that who ate apples.

Chapman’s apples did not have the reputation for being very good. In 1870, a writer candidly admitted the fruit was “of inferior quality”:

“Many of our readers have noticed the aged apple trees growing along the banks of streams in this and adjoining counties, the date of the planting of which is far back of the time when our oldest inhabitants settled in this part of the State. The origin of the ancient apple trees is attributed to the subject of this article [Ed: Johnny Appleseed], who was well known to many of our oldest settlers. These trees are to be found along the banks of the Blanchard, Auglaize and neighboring rivers; a few years ago a number of them were still bearing fruit — although of an inferior character… ^[20] — Johnny Appleseed. Findlay, Ohio: The Hancock Courier. Thursday, 28 July 1870. Page 3, col. 4.

While it could be debated whether the writer meant the quality of Chapman’s apples was poor for use in cider, or for eating, or just in general, it’s possible that Chapman himself didn’t mind the poor quality of the apples his efforts produced. Nowhere is it recorded that anyone accused him of being a gourmand. At one point, he reputedly fished bread out of a pig’s slop bucket, presumably to eat it:

“He was plain in his diet, and his stomach did not trouble him… At one time it was said that he took some bread out of a slop bucket at a pioneer’s cabin, and reproved the woman of the house for wasting God’s food.“ — Stephens, Henry. Johnny Appleseed: A Chat with a Man Who Knew The Pioneer Prophet. Leavenworth, Kansas: The Leavenworth Weekly Times. Thursday, 16 August 1888. Page 6, col. 1.

Perhaps he felt that divine intervention would miraculously cause the mongrel seedlings to produce good fruit, if that were God’s will. Around 1801, he reputedly said “God only can improve the apple.” ^[21]Pilkington, Steve. A is for Apple, B is for Billings and C is for Chapman. In: Zager, Daniel (ed). Music and Theology: Essays in Honor of Robin A. Leaver. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2007. Page 198.

The assumption that many food writers today make is that any old apple can be used to make cider, no matter how shrivelled, mealy, small, bitter or sour it is. This could be debatable, if one sets aside the added qualification of “…that anyone would want to consume.”

An additional assumption is made that the settlers didn’t want other apple products as well as cider, such as apple pies or cobblers, or preserved apple products for the winter such as apple butter and dried apple rings. In fact, though, settlers did also want those things, which the seedling-grown apple trees typically wouldn’t have been able to give them.

Be that as it may, a lot of the homemade apple cider made from these mongrel apples may just have not been very good.

Cider has been made in England and on the continent for centuries. Cultivars of apples specially for cider, known as cider apples, were developed and perpetuated and still are to this day, because they reliably yield a good tasting cider.

William Kerrigan, professor of American history at Muskingum University in Ohio and author of “Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History”, notes:

“Most early American cider was a homemade hodgepodge of any available apples, dumped into the press in any condition… most of the cider made back then was of poor quality. Visiting Englishman often would comment on the sorry state of Colonial cider-making.” ^[22]Kerrigan, William. The Fall and Rise of Hard Cider. American Orchard blog. 31 August 2014. Accessed September 2021 at https://americanorchard.wordpress.com/2014/08/31/the-fall-and-rise-of-hard-cider/

And, alternatives were quickly becoming available:

“By the middle of the 19th century, as Americans increasingly embraced the modern, a new wave of German immigrants offered them the alternative of beer brewed in state of the art breweries. Beer was made in breweries, which are like factories — they’re modern. Beer seemed cleaner and a more efficient, modern drink.” ^[23]Kerrigan, William. The Fall and Rise of Hard Cider. American Orchard blog. 31 August 2014. Accessed September 2021 at https://americanorchard.wordpress.com/2014/08/31/the-fall-and-rise-of-hard-cider/

The first German-brewery had already opened in Ohio in 1829, heralding the future, while Johnny was still planting apple seeds for the past. Ohio would soon become a beer brewing powerhouse:

“In 1860, as many as 36 breweries operated in Cincinnati. By 1889, a fewer number of breweries (23) produced even more beer, collectively brewing 35,700,000 gallons of suds drunk the world over… In fact, so much beer was made and consumed in Cincinnati that in 1890 it was dubbed the “Beer Capital of the World.” ^[24]Barnett, Cait. Built on Beer: The Cincinnati Region’s Brewing History. Cincinnati USA Website. 11 July 2014. Accessed September 2021 at view-source:https://cincinnatiusa.com/article/built-beer-cincinnati-regions-brewing-history

And so, homemade hard cider — that may not even have tasted all that great — faded from the scene.

But out of all the not-very-good apple trees provided by Chapman, simply because so very many were planted — Chapman must have planted thousands and thousands, if not tens of thousands — a few were bound to be good for uses other than just cider. The lucky farmer with such a tree could start selling grafts from it to others and develop another stream of income:

“Occasionally, an apple with unusual and desirable characteristics would arise. This new apple might be rather large, or highly colored, or exceptionally early, or prolific; maybe it kept like a cobblestone or made an exquisite apple pie; maybe it was just the best apple you’d ever tasted. Eventually, the farmer who planted the tree would graft new starts…” ^[25]Hensley, Tim. A Curious Tale: The Apple in North America. Brooklyn Botanic Garden. 2 June 2005. Accessed September 2021 at https://www.bbg.org/gardening/article/the_apple_in_north_america

In 1878, an Ohio newspaper editor guessed that a good quality edible apple might have come from a tree planted by Chapman (though he also owns it might have originated with the Wyandot Indians):

“Dr. Bair has placed on the editorial table an apple with a very interesting history.

It was plucked by Mrs. Bair from a tree said to have been planted by the Wyandot Indians over fifty years ago. The tree stands near the old Cherokee ford, across the Sandusky river, about eight miles below Upper Sandusky. It was possibly planted by the well-known Johnny Appleseed.

The tree is over six feet in circumference and the branches are proportionately large and spreading. The apple is rather above the medium size, the body color is a rich yellow and streaked with bright red. It is a specimen sample of a fine apple, with an unusually fragrant perfume, and it is believed to be a natural fruit. Mrs. Bair kindly gathered it expressly for the JOURNAL. Many thanks for so interesting a present.” — An Interesting Apple. Bucyrus, Ohio: Bucyrus Journal. Friday, 22 November 1878. Page 3, col. 4.

Would Chapman have wanted the apples to be for cider?

As mentioned above, John Chapman was a fervent follower of the religious teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg appears to have favoured the practice of vegetarianism ^[26]”Jonathan Rose explains that Swedenborg mentions the eating of meat several times in his writings, but he doesn’t appear to come down on one side or the other. In one passage, he seems to imply that eating meat is savage (Secrets of Heaven §1002), and this has influenced a number of Swedenborgians to become vegetarian. In another passage (Divine Love and Wisdom §331), though, Swedenborg refers to eating meat as a normal practice, with no reference to his earlier remarks. What about Swedenborg himself? According to the anecdotes left behind by those who knew him, Swedenborg was primarily a vegetarian who occasionally ate fish, but he would only eat red meat if he was offered it as a guest in someone’s house or at some type of public function.” — Swedenborg and Life Recap: 10 Questions: Soulmates, Eating Animals, and Spiritual Families. 2 December 2016. Accessed September 2021 at https://swedenborg.com/recap-10-questions-soulmates-eating-animals-spiritual-families/ . Swedenborg also encouraged abstinence from alcohol:

“One of [Swedenborg’s] cherished projects was in the direction of temperance or absolute prohibition of alcoholic beverages…Since the immoderate use of alcohol would destroy the mental alertness of the individual and blind him to the influx of the spirit, temperance was advocated.” ^[27]Hawley, Charles Arthur. “Swedenborgianism and the Frontier.” Church History, vol. 6, no. 3, [American Society of Church History, Cambridge University Press], 1937, pp. 203–22, https://doi.org/10.2307/3160825. Pp 206, 210.

It’s easy to find repeated reference to Chapman’s assiduous practice of vegetarianism.

“He believed it to be a sin to kill any creature for food, and thought that all that was necessary for human sustenance was produced by the soil.” — W.D. Haley. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

It’s less easy to find reference to his view of alcohol. CooksInfo has to date come across only this one passage from 1871:

“He was regarded as a temperate man, and so he was, but occasionally he would take a dram of spirits to keep him a little warm, as he said.” ^[28]Dawson, John W. Johnny Appleseed – Further Particulars. Defiance, Ohio: Defiance Democrat. Saturday, 23 December 1871. Page 3, col. 5.

And, Chapman doesn’t seem to have had any objection to places that served alcohol:

“He preferred to lie on the floor of a tavern or private house — always laid in the bar room at the hotel…” ^[29]Dawson, John W. Johnny Appleseed – Further Particulars. Defiance, Ohio: Defiance Democrat. Saturday, 23 December 1871. Page 3, col. 5.

If it’s true — as modern food writers assert — that his apple trees were intended for use in hard cider production, it would be an interesting question to know what his view of his facilitating this use was. He couldn’t have been unaware of the use. Perhaps he was less fervent about this aspect of Swedenborgianism. Or perhaps, given that he was not a very discriminating eater, he thought that many of the apples could be eaten as well.

The fate of Johnny Appleseed’s trees

As of 2018, only one tree known with certainty to have been planted by Johnny Appleseed still survived, in the village of Savannah, Ohio.

“The Algeo family proudly displays a certificate of authenticity of the last living apple tree planted by Johnny Appleseed, presented in 1991 by the American Forests organization of Washington, D.C.” ^[30]Sangiacomo, Michael. Ohio Tiny Towns: Last living Johnny Appleseed tree is pride of Savannah. Cleveland, Ohio: Plain Dealer. 6 May 2018. Accessed September 2021 at https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2018/05/tiny_towns_ohio_last_living_jo.html

The tree produces edible fruit, which may be one of the reasons it was not chopped down long ago.

Many of Chapman’s trees disappeared from natural causes over the years. Some were wiped out in places by a hurricane which swept over the Ohio River and down the Miami Valley on the night of Friday, the 4th of July, 1873:

“The orchards particularly have suffered. In the territory described there is scarcely one but has its losses. Many of the old apple trees that came from Johnny Appleseed’s Nurseries after braving the storms of half a century, succumbed at last to the hurricane last Friday.” — Great Storm in Crawford County. Fremont, Ohio: The Fremont Weekly Journal. Friday, 18 July 1873. Page 2, col. 5.

One of his earliest Ohio orchards, established 5 miles south-west of Flushing, Belmont County, Ohio, is now under the artificially-created Piedmont Lake. ^[31]Stratton House Inn.  The Belmont Apple and Johnny Appleseed. Retrieved September 2021 from http://strattonhouse.com/index.php?section=history&content=johnny_appleseed.

Did Johnny Appleseed wear a coffee sack?

Writers in the second half of the 1800s disagreed on whether Appleseed wore a coffee sack as clothing, or not.

A medical doctor, William Bushnell of Mansfield, Ohio, said that Appleseed did indeed wear a coffee sack, at least at times:

“I have seen him at times when his chief garment was a coffee sack with a hole at the top of his head to pass through and one on each side for his arms.” — Dr William Bushnell to Henry Stephens, 1888. ^[32]Stephens, Henry. Johnny Appleseed: A Chat with a Man Who Knew The Pioneer Prophet. Leavenworth, Kansas: The Leavenworth Weekly Times. Thursday, 16 August 1888. Page 6, col. 1.

Judge C.S. Coffinberry, whose parents were friends with Chapman, and consequently knew Chapman since the writer was a child, was adamant that Appleseed never wore a coffee sack:

“The writer here assumes to say that he never wore coffee sack as a part of his apparel. He may have worn the offcast clothing of others; he probably did so… He was frequently seen with shirt, pants and a long-tailed coat of the tow–linen then much worn by the farmers. This coat was a device of his own ingenuity, and in itself was a curiosity. It consisted of one width of the coarse fabric, which descended from his neck to his heels. It was without collar. In this robe were cut two arm holes into which were placed two straight sleeves. The mother of the writer made it up for him under his immediate direction and supervision.” — Coffinberry, C.S. Another Article On Johnny Appleseed (From the Mansfield Shield and Banner). In: Bucyrus, Ohio: Telegraph-Forum. Saturday, 16 December 1871. Page 2, col. 2.

But the person who buried Appleseed, a Samuel Flutter, says that Appleseed was wearing a coffee sack when he died:

“Mr. Flutter tells me that Appleseed had on, when he died, next his body, a coarse coffee-sack, with a hole cut in the centre through which he passed his head” — Dawson, John W. Johnny Appleseed – Further Particulars. Defiance, Ohio: Defiance Democrat. Saturday, 23 December 1871. Page 3, col. 5

It could be that people mistook the coarse cloth as being that from a coffee sack. Or, that it really was a coffee sack he wore at times, perhaps even with printing on it.

“But his garb was not always alike, and some have seen him in other garbs and under other circumstances and those noted by Mr. Haley, so that someone would describe him in one way and some another.” — Dawson, John W. Johnny Appleseed – Further Particulars. Defiance, Ohio: Defiance Democrat. Saturday, 23 December 1871. Page 3, col. 5.

Johnny Appleseed and weed introduction

Like some others, Appleseed believed erroneously that the weed ‘dog fennel’ (aka Mayseed, Eupatorium capillifolium) could be used to make a tea that helped cure malaria. ^[33]Eupatorium capillifolium doesn’t help with malaria. See: Liana, Desy, and Kanchana Rungsihirunrat. “Phytochemical screening, antimalarial activities, and genetic relationship of 16 indigenous Thai Asteraceae medicinal plants: A combinatorial approach using phylogeny and ethnobotanical bioprospecting in antimalarial drug discovery.” Journal of advanced pharmaceutical technology & research vol. 12,3 (2021): 254-260. doi:10.4103/japtr.JAPTR_238_21. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8300331/ Not only does it not, but it contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids which can be liver-damaging when consumed regularly in large enough quantities. Owing to this, along with apple seeds, he also sewed dog fennel seeds in his travels, which caused farmers much grief:

“A widespread annoyance was really the result of his belief that the offensively-odored weed known in the west as the dog-fennel, but more generally styled the May-weed, possessed valuable antimalarial virtues. He procured some seeds of the plant in Pennsylvania, and sewed them in the vicinity of every house in the region of his travels. The consequence was that successive flourishing crops of the weed spread over the whole country, and caused almost as much trouble as the disease it was intended to ward off; and to this day the dog-fennel, introduced by Johnny Appleseed, is one of the worst grievances of the Ohio farmers.” — W.D. Haley. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

He also brought other weed seeds to Ohio and introduced those weeds there too, as well:

“Whereas this eccentric person benefited mankind by planting fruit trees, he also mistakingly thought to, in the same manner, bless him by spreading the medicinal herbs of the other sections of the country. Thus he dropped a handful of dog fennel, pennyroyal, catnip, hoarhound, mullen or rattle-root seed or the seed of some other medicinal plant of the housewife, along his path in his journeys, especially at the wayside near dwellings. In fact he inflicted an evil when he sought to do good, for the rank fennel lines our highways and borders our lands and steals into our dooryards and has become a pest.” — Harn, George U. A Unique Character. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh Dispatch. Sunday, 3 May 1891. Page 10, col. 6.

Johnny Appleseed’s relations with women

John Chapman did not have successful personal relationships with women. And a story of his relation with a young girl, seen through today’s eyes at least, borders on troubling.

He was reportedly engaged to a woman when he was a young man still in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania. She jilted him, which may be understandable if any of his later eccentricities had already started to manifest themselves:

“His crankiness [Ed: meaning ‘eccentricity’] came from being crossed in love. He used to refer indirectly to this at times, and he was not particularly fond of the society of women, though he was always respectful to them. It was after he had been jilted by the girl to whom it was that he was engaged that he took to walking about and reading Swedenborgian books, and later on he came westward on his mission.” — Stephens, Henry. Johnny Appleseed: A Chat with a Man Who Knew The Pioneer Prophet. Leavenworth, Kansas: The Leavenworth Weekly Times. Thursday, 16 August 1888. Page 6, col. 1.

In 1891, a Rosella Rice recounted filled in more details to a Pittsburgh Dispatch writer. The person that he had said he was engaged to had in fact been a young girl that he had been, to admittedly use today’s values and parlance, grooming:

“There was romance in Johnny’s early days. He had loved, and his love had proved false. When quite a young man he had provided a home for a friendless child, sent her to school, clothed her, and hoped to marry her, but when scarce 15 she gave herself to another young man. That was the story Johnny told, and as he told it, young as I was, I now remember how his gray eyes grew dark as violets, the pupils enlarged, and his voice rose, while his nostrils dilated and his thin lips worked with emotion.” — Miss Rosella Rice, Ashland County. In: Hahn, George U. A Unique Character. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh Dispatch. Sunday, 3 May 1891. Page 10, col. 6.

Later in life, John had an imaginary relationship with ‘celestial’ women:

“[he] claimed to have frequent conversations with angels and spirits; two of the latter, of the feminine gender, he asserted, had revealed to him they were to be his wives in the future state if he abstained from a matrimonial alliance on earth.” — W.D. Haley. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

In 1882, a wag in Iowa wrote:

“We are inclined to think that Mr. Appleseed was mistaken in this matter, however. We were shown what is said to be a portrait of him, and if it be true he was not the manner of man for two beautiful female spirits to get very much mashed on. Perhaps, however, the spirits only visited him in dark seances, and he probably looked much more alluring in the dark.” — Robert J.B. Roaming Robert – Johnny Appleseed. Burlington, Iowa: Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye. Thursday, 30 November 1882. Page 8, col. 4.

At one point, Chapman developed a fixation on a young girl:

“He did not believe in marriage on earth, but held that he was raising a girl to be his spiritual wife in the new Jerusalem, to gain which all his life was a sacrifice. And on one occasion a gentleman now living, with whom he often lodged and ate, and who had a little daughter whom the old man fancied, was asking him if he would give him the child for a spiritual wife, and on thoughtlessly giving him his consent, Johnny regarded the bargain as sacred, and treated the child thereafter with much care. This, however, was interrupted by an accident. A neighbor’s children came over to see this child and others of the family, when the father told a little boy to kiss Johnny’s girl, which he did in Johnny’s presence. This was considered by Johnny as a violation of faith plighted by the father, and in anger declined to further care for his spiritual wife.” — Dawson, John W. Johnny Appleseed – Further Particulars. Defiance, Ohio: Defiance Democrat. Saturday, 23 December 1871. Page 3, col. 5.

He reportedly reserved his greatest affection for young girls:

“With grown up people and boys he was usually reticent, but manifested great affection for little girls, always having pieces of ribbon and gay calico to give to little favorites.” — W.D. Haley. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

Nineteenth century newspaper coverage

Much has been written about Johnny Appleseed, though he left nothing written by himself aside from a few signed legal documents.

Below is some secondary-source material written by those who knew him, or who knew people who knew him. Some of these nineteenth-century articles may contain outdated cultural depictions and assumptions, which were as wrong then as they are now. Some spelling is also non-standard. You will also encounter John Chapman incorrectly referred to as Jonathan Chapman.

Johnny Appleseed. Magazine of Horticulture. Coshocton, Ohio (1846)

“About the time of the survey of the lands in the United States military districts, north west of the river Ohio, preparatory to their location by those holding the warrants which had been issued by the government to the soldiers which had been issued by the government to the soldiers of the revolutionary war, for services during that war, there came to the valley of the Muskingum, and its tributaries, Tuscarawas, Walhouding, Mochican, etc., a man whose real name, if ever known, is not now remembered by the oldest inhabitants there, but who was commonly known and called all over the country by the name of Johnny Appleseed.

This man had imbibed so remarkable a passion for the rearing and cultivation of apple trees from seed, and pursued it with so much zeal and perseverance, as to cause him to be regarded by the few settlers, just then beginning to make their appearance in the country, with a degree of almost superstitious admiration.

Immediately upon his advent he commenced the raising of apple trees from the seed, at a time when there were not perhaps fifty white men within the forty miles square, he would clear a few rods of ground in some open part of the forest, girdle the trees standing upon it, surround it with a brush fence, and plant his apple seed. This done he would go off some twenty miles or so, select another favorable spot, and again go through the same operation. In this way, without family and without connection, he rambled from place to place, and employed his time, I may say his life.

When the settlers began to flock in, and open their ‘clearings’, old Appleseed was ready for them with his young apple trees; and it was not his fault if every one of them had not an orchard planted out and growing without delay. Thus he proceeded for many years, deriving a self-satisfaction amounting to delight, from the indulgence of his engrossing passion.

Such were the labors and such the life of Johnny Appleseed among us, and such his unmingled enjoyments, till about fifteen years ago, when, probably feeling the encroachments of others upon his sphere, and desiring a new and more extended field of operation he removed to the far West, there to enact over again the same career of humble but sublime usefulness.

This man, obscure and illiterate though he was, was yet, in some respects, another Dr Van Mons [Ed: Belgian physicist, chemist, botanist, horticulturist and pomologist], and must have been endued with the instinct of his theory. His usual practice was to gather his seeds from seedling trees, and to take them from as many different trees as were to be found within the range of his yearly autumnal rambles and from those particular seedling trees affording the highest evidence of their fruit that the process of amelioration was begun and going on in them. At first, his visits were necessarily extended to the seedling orchards upon the Ohio and Monongahela rivers in what were called the ‘settlements’; but when the orchards of his own planting began to bear, his wanderings, for the purpose of collecting seed, became more and more narrow in their extent, till the time of his departure further westward.

Still true, however to the instinct which first drew him to Van Mons theory, for the production of new ameliorated varieties of the apple, he has continued occasionally to return in the autumn to his beloved orchards hereabouts, for the double purpose of contemplating and ruminating upon the results of his labors, and of gathering seeds from his own seedling trees, to take with him and carry on by their means reproduction at the West. Recently, his visits have been altogether intermitted. Our hope is that he may yet live in the enjoyment of a green old age — happy in the multitude of its pleasing reminiscences. — Magazine of Horticulture. Coshocton, Ohio, Feb. 24, 1846.” — Johnny Appleseed. In: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania: The Wilkes Barre Advocate. 3 June 1846. Page 1, col. 5.

Johnny Appleseed. Eccentric character in the early history of Ohio. Chicago, Illinois (1870.)

“To one of the most singular agencies were many of our early settlers indebted for their apple tree nurseries, vestiges of which are yet to be seen, in the shape of patriarchical trees of giant size on the banks of the Maumee, Anglaize, St. Marys, Blanchard, and other rivers in some parts of Ohio.

We copy the following from the History of Richland County:

“At an early day there was a very eccentric character, frequently in this region, who was well remembered by the early settlers. His name was Jonathan Chapman, but he was usually known as ‘Johnny Appleseed.” He was originally, it is supposed, from New England.

He had imbibed a remarkable passion for the rearing and cultivation of apple trees from the seed. He first made his appearance in Western Pennsylvania, and thence made his way into Ohio, keeping on the outskirts of the settlements, and following his favorite pursuit. He was accustomed to clear spots on the loamy lands on the banks of the streams, plant his seeds, enclose the ground, and then leave the place until the trees had in a measure grown. When the settlers began to flock in and open their ‘clearings’, Johnny was ready for them with his young trees, which he either gave away, or sold for some trifle, as an old coat, or any article of which he could make use. Thus he proceeded for many years, until the whole country was in a measure settled and supplied with apple trees, deriving self-satisfaction amounting to almost delight in the indulgence of his engrossing passion. About twenty years ago since he removed to the Far West, there to re-enact the same career of humble usefulness.

His personal appearance was as singular as his character. He was a small chunked man, quick and restless in his motion and conversation; his beard and hair were 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 barefooted, and often travelled miles through the snow in that way. In doctrine he was a follower of Swedenborg, leading a moral blameless life, making himself to the primitive Christians, literally taking no thought for the morrow. Wherever he went he circulated Swedenborgian works, and if short of them, would tear a book in two and give each part to different persons. He was careful not to injure any animal, and thought hunting morally wrong. He was welcome everywhere among the settlers, and treated with great kindness even by the Indians. We give a few anecdotes illustrative of his character and eccentricities:

On one cool abdominal night while lying by his campfire in the woods, he observed that the mosquitoes flew in the blaze and were burnt. Johnny, who wore on head a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot, filled it with water, and quenched the fire, and afterward 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 his campfire at the end of a hollow log, in which he intended to pass the night; but, finding it occupied by a bear and her cubs, he removed his fire to the other end, and slept on the snow, in the open air, rather than disturb the bear. He was, one morning, in a prairie, and was bitten by a rattlesnake. Sometime after, a friend inquired of him about the matter. He gave a long sigh and replied, ‘Poor fellow! He only just touched me, when I in an ungodly passion put the heel of my scythe upon him and went home. Sometime after I went there for my scythe, and there lay the poor fellow, dead.’ He bought a coffee bag, made a hole in the bottom, through which he thrust his head, and wore as a cloak, saying it was as good as anything. An itinerant preacher was holding forth on the Public Square in Mansfield, and exclaimed, ‘Where is the barefooted Christian, travelling to Heaven?’ Johnny, who was lying on his back on some timber, taking the question in its literal sense, raised his bare feet in the air, and vociferated, ‘Here he is!'” — Johnny Appleseed. Eccentric character in the early history of Ohio. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Tribune. Sunday, 24 July 1870. Page 5, col. 8.

Johnny Appleseed. Findlay, Ohio (1870)

“Many of our readers have noticed the aged apple trees growing along the banks of streams in this and adjoining counties, the date of the planting of which is far back of the time when our oldest inhabitants settled in this part of the State. The origin of the ancient apple trees is attributed to the subject of this article, who was well known to many of our oldest settlers. These trees are to be found along the banks of the Blanchard, Auglaize and neighboring rivers; a few years ago a number of them were still bearing fruit — although of an inferior character — on the banks of the river immediately below Maple Grove Cemetery. We find the following in reference to them, and to the individual who planted them, in sketches of Richland County:

“At an early day there was a very eccentric character, frequently in this region, who was well remembered by the early settlers. His name was Jonathan Chapman, but he was usually known as ‘Johnny Appleseed.’ He was originally, it is supposed, from New England.

He had imbibed a remarkable passion for the rearing and cultivation of apple trees from the seed. He first made his appearance in Western Pennsylvania, and thence made his way into Ohio, keeping on the outskirts of the settlements, and following his favorite pursuit. He was accustomed to clear spots on the loamy lands on the banks of the streams, plant his seeds, enclose the ground, and then leave the place until the trees had in a measure grown. When the settlers began to flock in and open their ‘clearings’, Johnny was ready for them with his young trees, which he either gave away, or sold for some trifle, as an old coat, or any article of which he could make use. Thus he proceeded for many years, until the whole country was in a measure settled and supplied with apple trees, deriving self-satisfaction amounting to almost delight in the indulgence of his engrossing passion. About twenty years ago since he removed to the Far West, there to re-enact the same career of humble usefulness.” — Johnny Appleseed. Findlay, Ohio: The Hancock Courier. Thursday, 28 July 1870. Page 3, col. 4.

Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine (1871)

This 1871 Harper’s Magazine piece contained a few factual errors, but it was the first national, major media piece about Johnny Appleseed.

“The first reliable trace of our modest hero finds him in the territory of Ohio, in 1801, with a horse–load of apple-seeds, which he planted in various places on and about the borders of Licking Creek, the first orchard thus originated by him being on the farm of Isaac Stadden, in what is now known as Licking County, in the State of Ohio. During the five succeeding years, although he was undoubtedly following the same strange occupation, we have no authentic account of his movements until we reach a pleasant spring day in 1806, when a pioneer settler in Jefferson County, Ohio, noticed a peculiar craft, with a remarkable occupant and the curious cargo, slowly dropping down with the current of the Ohio River. It was ‘Johnny Appleseed’, by which name Jonathan [Ed: John] Chapman was afterward known in every log cabin from the Ohio River to the Northern lakes, and westward to the prairies of what is now the State of Indiana. With two canoes lashed together he was transporting a load of apple-seeds to the western frontier, for the purpose of creating orchards on the furthest verge of white settlement. With his canoe he passed down the Ohio to Marietta, where he entered the Muskingum, ascending the stream of the river until he reached the mouth of the Walhounding, or White Woman Creek, and still onward, up the Mohican, into the Black Fork, to the head of navigation, in the region now known as Ashland and Richland counties, on the line of the Pittsburg and Fort Wayne railroad, in Ohio.

A long and toilsome voyage it was, as a glance at the map will show, and must have occupied a great deal of time, as the lonely traveller stopped at every inviting spot to plant the seeds and make his infant nurseries. These are the first well-authenticated facts in the history of Jonathan Chapman, whose birth there is good reason for believing, occurred in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1775. According to this, which was his own statement in one of his less reticent moods, he was, at the time of his appearance on Licking Creek, 26 years of age, and whether impelled in his eccentricities by some absolute misery of the heart which could only find relief in incessant motion, or governed by a benevolent monomania, his whole after life was devoted to the work of planting apple-seeds in remote places. The seeds he gathered from the cider presses of western Pennsylvania; but his canoe voyage in 1806 appears to have been the only occasion upon which he adopted that method of transporting them, as all his subsequent journeys were made on foot. Having planted his stock of seeds, he would return to Pennsylvania for a fresh supply, and, as sacks made of any less substantial fabric would not endure the hard usage of the long trip through the dense forest thick with underbrush and briars, he provided himself with leathern bags.

Securely packed, the seeds were conveyed, sometimes on the back of a horse, and not unfrequently on his own shoulders, either over a part of the old Indian trail that led from Fort Duquesne to Detroit, by way of Fort Sandusky, or over what is styled, in the appendix to ‘Hutchin’s History of Boguet’s Expedition in 1764’, the ‘second route through the wilderness of Ohio’ which would require him to traverse a distance of one hundred and thirty-six miles in a northwest direction from Fort Duquesne in order to reach the Black Fork of the Mohican.

This region, although it is now densely populated, still possesses a romantic beauty that railroads and bustling towns cannot obliterate — a country of forest-clad hills and green valleys, through which numerous bright streams flow on their way to the Ohio; but when Johnny Appleseed reached some lonely log cabin he would find himself in a veritable wilderness. The old settlers say that the margins of the streams, near which the first settlements were generally made, were thickly covered with a low, matted growth of small timber, while nearer to the water was a rank mass of long grass, interlaced with morning-glory and wild pea-vines, among which funeral willows and clustering alders stood like sentinels on the outpost of civilization. The hills, that arise almost to the dignity of mountains, were crowned with forest trees, and in the coverts were innumerable bears, wolves, deer, and droves of wild hogs, that were as ferocious as any beasts of prey. In the grass the Massasauga and other venomous reptiles lurked in such numbers that a settler named Chandler has left the fact on record that during the first season at his residence, while mowing a little prairie which formed part of his land, he killed over two hundred black rattlesnakes in an area that would involve an average destruction of one of these reptiles for each rod of land. The frontiers-man, who felt himself sufficiently protected by his rifle against wild beasts and hostile Indians, found it necessary to guard against the attacks of the insidious enemies in the grass by wrapping bandages of dried grass around his buckskin leggings and moccasins; but Johnny would shoulder his bag of apple seeds, and with bare feet penetrate to some remote spot that combined picturesqueness and fertility of soil, and there he would plant his seeds, place a slight inclosure around the place, and leave them to grow until the trees were large enough to be transplanted by the settlers, who, in the meantime, would have made their clearings in the vicinity. The sites chosen by him are, many of them, well known, and are such as an artist or a poet would select — open places on the loamy lands that border the creeks — rich, secluded spots, hemmed in by giant trees, picturesque now, but fifty years ago, with their wild surroundings and the primal silence, they must have been tenfold more so.

In personal appearance Chapman was a small, wiry man, full of restless activity; he had long dark hair, a scanty beard that was never shaved and keen black eyes that sparkled a peculiar brightness. His dress was the oddest description. Generally, even in the coldest weather, he went barefooted, but sometimes, for his long journeys, he would make himself a rude pair of sandals; at other times he would wear any cast-off foot-covering chanced to find — a boot on one foot and an old brogan or a moccasin on the other. It appears to have been a matter of conscience with him never to purchase shoes, although he was rarely without money enough to do so. On one occasion, in an unusually cold November, while he was traveling barefooted through mud and snow, a settler who happened to possess pair of shoes that were too small for his own use forced their acceptance upon Johnny, declaring that it was sinful for a human being to travel with naked feet in such weather. A few days afterward the donor was in the village that has since become the thriving city of Mansfield, and met his beneficiary contentedly plodding along with his feet bare and half-frozen. With some degree of anger he inquired for the cause of such foolish conduct, and received for reply that Johnny had overtaken a poor, barefooted family moving Westward, and as they appeared to be in much greater need of clothing than he was, he had given them the shoes. His dress was generally composed of cast-off clothing, that he had taken in payment for apple-trees; and as the pioneers were far less extravagant than their descendants in such matters, the homespun and buckskin garments that they discarded would not be very elegant or serviceable. In his later years, however; he seems to have thought that even this kind of secondhand raiment was too luxurious, as his principal garment was made of a coffee-sack in which he cuts holes for his head and arms to pass through, and pronounced it “a very serviceable cloak, and as good clothing as any man need wear.” In the matter of headgear his taste was equally unique; his first experiment was with a tin vessel that served to cook his mush, but this was open to the objection that it did not protect his eyes from the beams of the sun; so he constructed a hat of pasteboard with immense peak in front, and having thus secured an article that combined usefulness with economy, it became his permanent fashion.

Thus strangely clad, he was perpetually wandering through forests and morasses, and suddenly appearing in white settlements and Indian villages; but there must have been some rare force of gentle goodness dwelling in his looks and breathing in his words, for it is the testimony of all who knew him that, notwithstanding his ridiculous attire, he was always treated with the greatest respect by the rudest frontiers-men, and, what is a better test, the boys of the settlements forbore to jeer at him. With grown up people and boys he was usually reticent, but manifested great affection for little girls, always having pieces of ribbon and gay calico to give to little favorites. Many a grandmother in Ohio and Indiana can remember the presents she received when a child from poor homeless Johnny Appleseed. When he consented to eat with any family he would never sit down to the table until he was assured that there was an ample supply for the children; and his sympathy for their youthful troubles and his kindness toward them made him friends among all the juveniles of the borders.

The Indians also treated Johnny with the greatest kindness. By these wild and sanguinary savages he was regarded as a ‘great medicine man’, on account of his strange appearance, eccentric actions, and, especially, the fortitude with which he could endure pain, in proof of which he would often thrust pins and needles into his flesh. His nervous sensibilities really seem to have been less acute than those of ordinary people, for his methods of treating the cuts and sores that were the consequences of his barefooted wandering through briars and thorns was to sear the wound with a red-hot iron, and then cure the burn. In the war of 1812, when the frontier settlers were tortured and slaughtered by the savage allies of Great Britain, Johnny Appleseed continued his wanderings, and was never harmed by the roving bands of hostile Indians. How many occasions the impunity with which he ranged the country enabled him to give the settlers warning of approaching danger in time to allow them to take refuge in their block-houses before the savages could attack them. Our informant refers to one of these instances, when the news of Hull’s surrender came like a thunder-bolt upon the frontier. Large bands of Indians and British were destroying everything before them and murdering defenceless women and children, and even the block-houses were not always a sufficient protection. At this time Johnny traveled day and night, warning the people of the approaching danger. He visited every cabin and delivered this message: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, and he hath anointed me to blow the trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for, behold, the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring flame followeth after them.” The aged man who narrated this incident said that he could feel even now the thrill that was caused by this prophetic announcement of the wild looking herald of danger, who aroused the family on a bright moonlight midnight with his piercing voice. Refusing all offers of food and denying himself a moment’s rest, he traversed the border day and night until he had warned every settler of approaching peril.

His diet was as meagre as his clothing. He believed it to be a sin to kill any creature for food, and thought that all that was necessary for human sustenance was produced by the soil. He was also a strenuous opponent of the waste of food, and on one occasion, on approaching a log-cabin, he observed some fragments of bread floating up on the surface of a bucket of slops that was intended for the pigs. He immediately fished them out, and when the housewife expressed her astonishment, he told her that it was an abuse of the gifts of a merciful God to allow the smallest quantity of anything that was designed to supply the wants of mankind to be diverted from its purpose.

In this instance, as in his whole life, the peculiar religious ideas of Johnny Appleseed were exemplified. He was a most earnest disciple of the faith taught by Emanuel Swedenborg, and himself claimed to have frequent conversations with angels and spirits; two of the latter, of the feminine gender, he asserted, had revealed to him they were to be his wives in the future state if he abstained from a matrimonial alliance on earth. He entertained a profound reverence for the revelations of the Swedish seer, and always carried a few old volumes with him. These he was very anxious should be read by everyone, and he was probably not only the first colporteur in the wilderness of Ohio, but as he had no tract society to furnish him supplies, he certainly devised an original method of multiplying one book into a number. He divided his books into several pieces, leaving a portion at a log-cabin, and on a subsequent visit furnishing another fragment, and continuing this process as diligently as though the work had been published in serial numbers. By this plan he was enabled to furnish reading for several people at the same time, and out of one book; but it must have been a difficult undertaking for some nearly illiterate backwoodsman to endeavour to comprehend Swedenborg by a backward course of reading, when his first installment happened to be the last fraction of the volume. Johnny’s faith in Swedenborg’s works was so reverential as almost to be superstitious. He was once asked if, in travelling barefooted through forests abounding with venomous reptiles, he was not afraid of being bitten. With his peculiar smile, he took his book from his bosom, and said, “This book is an available protection against all danger here and here after.”

It was his custom, when he had been welcomed to some hospitable log-house after a very day of journeying, to lie down on the puncheon floor, and, after inquiring if his auditors would hear “some news right fresh from heaven”, produce his few tattered books, amongst which would be a New Testament, and read and expound until his uncultivated hearers would catch the spirit and glow of his enthusiasm, while they scarcely comprehended his language. A lady who knew him in his later years, writes in the following terms of one of these domiciliary readings of poor, self-sacrificing Johnny Appleseed: “We can hear him right now, just as he did that summer day, when we were busy quilting upstairs, and he lay near the door, 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. It was a strange eloquence at times, and he was undoubtedly a man of genius.”

What a scene is presented to our imagination! The interior of a primitive cabin, the wide, open fireplace, where a few sticks are burning beneath the iron pot in which the evening meal is cooking; around the fireplace the attentive group, composed of the sturdy pioneer and his wife and children, listening with a reverential awe to the “news right fresh from heaven” and reclining on the floor, clad in rags, but with his gray hairs glorified by the beams of the setting sun that flood through the open door and the unchinked logs of the humble building, this poor wanderer, with a gift of genius and eloquence, who believes with the faith of apostles and martyrs that God has appointed him a mission in the wilderness to preach the gospel of love, and plant apple seeds that shall produce orchards for the benefit of men and women and little children whom he has never seen. If there is a sublimer faith or a more genuine eloquence in richly decorated cathedrals and under brocade vestments, it would be worth a long journey to find it.

Next to his advocacy of his peculiar religious ideas, his enthusiasm for the cultivation of apple trees in what he termed, “the only proper way” — that is, from the seed — was the absorbing object of his life. Upon this, as upon religion, he was eloquent in his appeals. He would describe the growing and ripening fruit as such a rare and beautiful gift of the Almighty with words that became pictures, until his heroes could almost see its manifold forms of beauty present before them. To his eloquence on the subject, as well as to his actual labours in planting nurseries, the country over which he travelled for so many years is largely indebted for its numerous orchards. But he denounced as absolute wickedness all devices of pruning and grafting, and would speak of the act of cutting a tree as if it were a cruelty inflicted upon a sentient being.

Not only is he entitled to the fame of being the earliest colporteur on the frontiers, but in the work of protecting animals from abuse and suffering he preceded, while, in his smaller sphere, he equalled the zeal of the good Mr. Bergh. Whenever Johnny saw an animal abused, or heard of it, he would purchase it to some more humane settler, on condition that it should be kindly treated and properly cared for. It frequently happened that the long journey into the wilderness would cause the new settlers to be encumbered with lame and broken-down horses, that were turned loose to die. In the autumn Johnny would make a diligent search for all such animals, and gathering them up, he would bargain for their food and shelter until the next spring, when he would lead them away to some pasture for the summer. If they recovered so as to be capable of working, he would never sell them, but lend or give them away, stipulating for their good usage. His conception of the absolute sin of inflicting pain or death upon any creature was not limited to the higher forms of animal life, but everything that had being was to him, in the fact of its life, endowed with so much of the Divine Essence that to wound or destroy it was to inflict an injury upon some atom of Divinity.

No Brahmin could be more concerned for the preservation of insect life, and the only occasion on which he destroyed a venomous reptile was a source of long regret, to which he could never refer without manifesting sadness. He had selected a suitable place for planting apple seeds on a small prairie, and in order to prepare the ground he was mowing the long grass, when he was bitten by a rattlesnake. In describing the event he sighed heavily, and said, “Poor fellow, he only just touched me, when I, in the heat of my ungodly passion, put the heel of my scythe in him, and went away. Sometime afterward I went back, and there lay the poor fellow dead.”

Numerous anecdotes bearing upon his respect for every form of life are preserved, and form the staple of pioneer recollections. On one occasion, a cool autumnal night, when Johnny, who always camped out in preference to sleeping in a house, had built a fire near which he intended to pass the night, he noticed that the blaze attracted large numbers of mosquitoes, many of whom flew too near to his fire and were burned. He immediately brought water and quenched the fire, accounting for his conduct afterward by saying, “God forbid that I should build a fire for my comfort which should be the means of destroying any of His creatures.”

At another time he removed the fire he had built near a hollow log, and slept on the snow, because he found that the log contained a bear and her cubs, whom he said, he did not wish to disturb.

And this unwillingness to inflict pain or death was equally strong when he was a sufferer by it, as the following will show. Johnny had been assisting some settlers to make a road through the woods, and in the course of the work they accidentally destroyed a hornets’ nest. One of the angry insects soon found a lodgment under Johnny’s coffee-sack cloak, but although it stung him repeatedly, he removed it with the greatest kindness. The men who were present laughingly asked him why he did not kill it. To which he gravely replied that “it would not be right to kill the poor thing for it did not intend to hurt me.”

Theoretically he was as methodical in matters of business as any merchant. In addition to their picturesqueness, the locations of his nurseries were all fixed with a view to probable demand for the trees by the time they had obtained sufficient growth for transplanting. He would give them away to those who could pay for them. Generally, however, he sold them for old clothing or a supply of cornmeal; but he preferred to receive a note payable at some indefine [sic] period. When this was accomplished he seemed to think that the transaction was completed in a businesslike way; but if the giver of the note did not attend to its payment, the holder of it never troubled himself about its collection.

His expenses for food and clothing were so very limited that, notwithstanding his freedom from the auri sacra fames [‘cursed hunger for gold’], he was frequently in possession of more money than he cared to keep, and it was quickly disposed of for wintering infirm horses, or given to some poor family whom the ague had prostrated or the accidents of border life impoverished. In a single instance only, he is known to have invested his surplus means in the purchase of land, having received a deed from Alexander Findley, of Mohican Township, Ashland County, Ohio, for part of the southwest quarter of section twenty-six; but with his customary indifference to matters of value, Johnny failed to record the deed, and lost it. Only a few years ago the property was in litigation.

We must not leave the reader under the impression that this man’s life, so full of hardship and perils, was a gloomy or unhappy one. There is an element of human pride in all martyrdom, which, if it does not soften the pains, stimulates the power of endurance. Johnny’s life was made serenely happy by the conviction that he was living like the primitive Christians. Nor was he devoid of a keen humor, to which he occasionally gave vent, as the following will show.

Toward the latter part of Johnny’s career in Ohio an itinerant missionary found his way to the village of Mansfield, and preached to an open-air congregation. The discourse was tediously lengthy, and unnecessarily severe upon the sin of extravagance, which was beginning to manifest itself among the pioneers by an occasional indulgence in the carnal vanities of calico and “store tea”. There was a great deal of the pharisaic leaven in the preacher, who very frequently emphasized his discourse by the inquiry, “Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is travelling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” When this interrogation had been repeated beyond all reasonable endurance, Johnny rose from the log on which he was reclining, and advancing to the speaker, he placed one of his bare feet up on the stump which served for a pulpit, and pointing to his coffee-sack garment, he quietly said, “Here’s your primitive Christian!” The well-clothed missionary hesitated and stammered and dismissed the congregation. His pet antithesis was destroyed by Johnny’s personal appearance, which was far more primitive than the preacher cared to copy.

Some of the pioneers were disposed to think that Johnny’s humor was the cause of an extensive practical joke: but is now generally considered known that a widespread annoyance was really the result of his belief that the offensively-odored weed known in the west as the dog-fennel, but more generally styled the May-weed, possessed valuable antimalarial virtues. He procured some seeds of the plant in Pennsylvania, and sewed them in the vicinity of every house in the region of his travels. The consequence was that successive flourishing crops of the weed spread over the whole country, and caused almost as much trouble as the disease it was intended to ward off; and to this day the dog-fennel, introduced by Johnny Appleseed, is one of the worst grievances of the Ohio farmers.

In 1738 — thirty-seven years after his appearance on Licking Creek — Johnny noticed that civilization, wealth, and population were pressing into the wilderness of Ohio. Hitherto he had easily kept just in advance of the wave of settlement; but now towns and churches were making their appearance, and even, at long intervals, the stage-driver’s horn broke the silence of the grand old forest, and he felt that his work was done in the region in which he had laboured so long. He visited every house, and took a solemn farewell of all the families. Little girls with his gifts of fragments of calico and ribbons had become sober matrons, and the boys who had wondered at his ability to bear the pain caused by running needles into his flesh were heads of families. With parting words of admonition he left them, and turned his steps steadily toward the setting sun.

During the succeeding nine years he pursued his eccentric avocation on the western border of Ohio and Indiana. In the summer of 1847 [Ed: this is incorrect. Chapman died in March 1845], when his labors had literally born fruit over 100,000 square miles of territory, at the close of a warm day, after travelling twenty miles, he entered the house of a settler in Allen County, Indiana, and was, as usual, warmly welcomed. He declined to eat with the family, but accepted some bread and milk, which he partook of sitting on the doorstep and gazing on the setting sun. Later in the evening he delivered his “news right from heaven” by reading the Beatitudes. Declining other accommodation, he slept, as usual, on the floor, and in the early morning he was found with his features all aglow with a supernatural light, and his body so near death that his tongue refused its office. The physician, who was hastily summoned, pronounced him dying, but added that he had never seen a man in so placid a state at the approach of death. At seventy-two years of age, forty-six of which had been devoted to his self-imposed mission, he ripened into death as naturally and beautifully as the seeds of his own planting had grown into fibre and bud and blossom and the matured fruit.

Thus died one of the memorable men of pioneer times, who never inflicted pain or knew an enemy — a man of strange habits, in whom there dwelt a comprehensive love that reached with one hand downward to the lowest forms of life, and with the other upward to the very throne of God. A laboring, self-denying benefactor of his race, homeless, solitary, and ragged, he trod the thorny Earth with bare and bleeding feet, intent only upon making the wilderness fruitful. Now “no man knoweth of his sepulchre”; but his deeds will live in the fragrance of the apple blossoms he loved so well, and the story of his life, however crudely narrated, will be a perpetual proof that true heroism, pure benevolence, noble virtues and deeds that deserve immortality may be found under meanest apparel, and far from gilded halls and towering spires.”” — W.D. Haley. Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero. Harper’s Magazine, vol. 43, November 1871. Reproduced in: Millsburg, Ohio: Holmes County Republican. Thursday, 26 October 1871. Page 1, col. 5.

The Famous Johnny Appleseed. Defiance, Ohio (1871)

“In Harper’s Magazine for November, 1871, appeared a lengthy article upon Johnny Appleseed, contributed by W.D. Haley. In a few days after, we received the Fort Wayne Sentinel having a communication from Honourable John W. Dawson, of that place, suggesting some corrections to Mr. Haley’s article and giving many additional particulars, highly interesting to us as giving early reminiscences of the Upper Maumee valley. We thought we could do our readers no better service than to give these two articles an insertion at the same time. Few elderly people long resident here who have not heard of this well-known and now historic character, and who will not relish the reading of so complete a memoir as these contributions together make.

Chapman was frequently in this vicinity thirty or forty years ago. He started a nursery about 1828 at the mouth of Tiffin River, about one mile above Defiance, on lands now owned by Charles Krotz, by sowing the seed. The young trees, to the number of 10,000 or more, in a year or two after he took up and set out again on a piece of cleared land opposite Susketown, (now Florida), where they remained until sold out. They were left in charge of a resident agent, who furnished them in desired quantities at a fip-penny bit apiece, which we learned was Appleseed‘s uniform price.

Thomas Warren, of this place, then residing opposite the old Delaware Indian town, on what is now known as the Dunning farm, informs us that he and the late Nathan Shirley went together to this nursery and bought each 200 trees, for which they paid $24. Lewis Platter, Samuel Hughes and others of his neighbors, he remembers also got trees there about the same time. He thinks most of the orchards on the Maumee and Auglaize bottoms in the present Defiance, Paulding and Henry counties, were started from Appleseed’s nursery.

Mr. Warren also informs us that Appleseed stopped at his house for a week or more about 1830. He remembers his peculiar manners well and concurs in the material statements of these articles, respecting his manner, his dress, his style of speech, and particularly as to his tracts which he was ever ready to give away, to lend, or to read to those willing to hear. The next summer he was at a grove religious meeting in Delaware Township, attending closely to the public speaking, but in the intermissions handing about his tracts, and talking upon their import, but not however raising any controversy with the doctrines preached. Appleseed had also a nursery near Mount Blanchard, in the south-east corner of Hancock county, from which many orchards in the present Hancock, Wyandot and Hardin counties were supplied. Aside from these two and those at Fort Wayne, designated by Mr. Dawson, we know of none other planted by him in this valley. We add these items of purely local import, referring the reader to the carefully prepared and complete accounts of this singular man upon the other page.” — The Famous Johnny Appleseed. Defiance, Ohio: Defiance Democrat. 23 December 1871. Page 2, col 2.

Another Article On Johnny Appleseed. Mansfield, Ohio (1871)

“The pioneers of Western Virginia and of the state of Ohio were familiar with Johnny Appleseed, whose true name was John Chapman, not Jonathan, as stated in a recent article in Harper’s monthly periodical.

He was born in the state of Massachusetts, but at what period the writer never knew. As early as 1780 he was seen in the Autumn, for two or three successive years, along the banks of the Potomac river in Eastern Virginia. He attended the cider mills when the farmers made their cider and picked the apple seeds from the pumice after the cider had been expressed. This occupation procured for him the sobriquet of “Johnny Appleseed”. After he had procured a sufficient quantity of seed for his purpose, mounting to about a half bushel at one visit, he started westward with his sack of seeds upon his back, on foot and alone to cross the Alleghenies, and to penetrate the wilderness west of the mountains, embracing what was then known as “the new purchase”, and which is now the State of Ohio.

Years afterwards, when the hardy pioneers from Western Virginia and Pennsylvania scaled the Allegheny Mountains, and sought homes in the valleys of the Ohio, they found the little nurseries of seedling apple trees at Braddocks field, at Wheeling Creek, the Flats of Grave Creek, Holiday’s Cove, and at other places along the Ohio River.

The eccentric, but ever amiable Chapman was also found here, ready to sell his seedlings to the settlers at a ‘fipping bill’ apiece. His habits of life were then as they remained until his decease. He would spend a week or ten days among the white settlers, or borderers, then penetrate to his nurseries on the banks of the Tuscarawas, or, as that river was then called in the language of the aborigines, Netusta-raws.

At length the fertile soil of Richland County invited the enterprise and industry further west. Here were traced the foot prints of Johnny Appleseed.

On the banks of Mohican Creek, at Mansfield, near the present site of the depot of the Pittsburg and Chicago Railroad, was found one of the seedling nurseries.

In the early part of the summer of 1861 the father of the writer drove the first team into the town of Mansfield. A party consisting of himself and family, Captain James Hodges (afterwards known as General Hodges), John C. Gilkison, Thomas Lolland, Jacob Newman, Michael Ruffder, James McClure, Jonathan Oldfield and Johnny Appleseed dined on the Public Square, near the present site of the old Court House. This was the commencement of the city of Mansfield.

Time! Time! How certain, although slow in thine inexorable fiats!

But three, who were present at that first repast in the city of Mansfield, in the midst of the forest shade, still remain, the writer (who was then six months old) and two older brothers.

For years Johnny Appleseed remained in the vicinity of Mansfield, as his home, or headquarters, whence he would make trips further west into the wilderness, attend to his nurseries of two or three months.

Near his plantations which were remote from any habitation, he provided comfortable shelters from the inclemency of the weather. Hollow trees and hollow logs, provided with a deep nest of dry leaves served these purposes in some cases. At his nursery in Sandusky Township, near the present location of Leesvile in Crawford County (then in Richland County), he erected a shelter by rearing large sections of the bark of the elm tree against a large log. Under this he had a home. From this nursery was obtained many of the orchards of Springfield Township. The father of the writer, Mordecai Bartley, Joseph Welch, Richard Condon, Matthew Curran and Jonathan Beach, went to the nursery in company, spent the night with Johnny, and packed the trees home the next day on horses.

They stopped, and broke their fast the next morning with the recluse. Both meals consisted of mush made of Indian meal, and the culinary utensil of the household consisted of camp kettle, a plate and a spoon.

The residence of Chapman at Mansfield covered the period of the war of 1812, and several years following it.

During the dangers and alarms of his period, Johnny Appleseed was recorded in the light of a protecting angel.

On the night of the massacre of Seymore’s family on the Blackfork, within a few miles of Mansfield, he left the house of Seymore, on foot, and entered Clinton, one mile north of Mount Vernon (which was not then located) by sunrise, passing every house on his way to give the alarm.

Although I was then a mere child I could remember, as if it were yesterday, the warning cry of Johnny Appleseed, as he stood before my father’s log cabin door, on that night; the cabin stood right where now stands the old North American in the city of Mansfield. I remember the precise language, the clear loud voice, the deliberate exclamation, and the fearful thrill it awoke in my bosom.

“Fly! Fly for your lives! The Indians are murdering and scalping Seymores and Copuses.” These were his words. My father sprang to the door, but the messenger was gone, and midnight silence reigned without.

Many other circumstances incident to the exposed frontier settlements in days of danger which try men’s souls manifested the cool courage, the discreet foresight and the mature and deliberate judgement, as well as the fidelity, patience and obligation of the good Johnny Appleseed.

John Chapman was a small man, wiry and thin in habit. His cheeks were hollow; his face and neck dark and skinny from exposure to the weather. His mouth was small; his nose small and turned up quite so much so, as apparently to raise his upper lip. His eye was dark and deeply set in his head, but searching and penetrating. His hair was black and straight which he parted in the middle, and permitted to fall about his neck. His hair withal, was rather thin, fine and glossy. He never wore a full beard, but shaved all clean except a thin roach at the bottom of his throat. His beard was lightly set, sparse and very black. In 1840 when the writer last saw him in Mansfield this was his appearance and at that time he had changed but little if any, in his general appearance, since he first remembered seeing him when the writer was a small boy. The dress of the strange man was unique. The writer here assumes to say that he never wore coffee sack as a part of his apparel. He may have worn the offcast clothing of others; he probably did so. Although often in rags and tatters, and at best in the most plain and simple wardrobe he was always clean, and, in his most desolate rags comfortable, and never repulsive. He generally, when the weather would permit wore no clothing on his feet, consequently his feet were dark, hard and horny. He was frequently seen with shirt, pants and a long-tailed coat of the tow–linen then much worn by the farmers. This coat was a device of his own ingenuity, and in itself was a curiosity. It consisted of one width of the coarse fabric, which descended from his neck to his heels. It was without collar. In this robe were cut two arm holes into which were placed two straight sleeves. The mother of the writer made it up for him under his immediate direction and supervision.

John Chapman was a regularly constituted Minister of the Church of the New Jerusalem according to the revelations of Emanuel Swedenborg. He was also a constituted Missionary of that faith under the authority of the regular association of that faith in the City of Boston, Mass. The writer has seen and examined his credentials as to the latter of these.

This strange man was a beautiful reader and never travelled without several of the Swedenborgan pamphlets with him, which he generally carried in his bosom, and which he was ever ready to produce and read upon request.

He never attempted to preach or to address public audiences. In private consultations, he often became enthusiastic, when he would frequently rise to expound the philosophy of his faith, on such occasions his eyes would flash, his wiry little form would swell, his voice expand and his clear thought burst into a starling inspiration of eloquence, complete and consummate, exulted and beautiful, forcible and replete with chaste figures and argumentative deductions.

His diction was pure and chaste and his language, simple but grammatical. The year of the erection of the old Court House in Mansfield, while the blocks of foundation stone and the timber lay scattered upon the Public Square, a wandering street preacher of the name of Paine, a man with a long white beard, who called himself “The Pilgrim”, entered the town. After blowing a long tinhorn which he carried with him, he assembled an audience on the stone and timbers of the Court House. In the course of the sermon he pointed to where Johnny Appleseed lay upon the ground with his feet resting upon the top of one of the stones, and exclaimed: “See you ragged old barefooted sinner and be warned of the path of sin by his example.”

Johnny Appleseed arose to his feet, folded his hands behind him, under his tow-linen coat, and slowly approached the speaker. As the speaker paused a space, Johnny commenced in this Wise: “I presume you thank God that you are not as other men?”

“I thank God that I am not as you are,” returned Paine.

“I am not a hypocrite, nor am I of the generation of vipers. I am a regularly appointed minister, whether you are or not. Lord be merciful unto me, a sinner,” said Chapman and walked away.

In 1840 John Chapman made his last visit to Mansfield; at that time he informed the writer that his home was near Fort Wayne in the state of Indiana, and that he had a sister residing near Fort Wayne.

In the character of John Chapman, there was nothing light or frivolous. He was free from all affectation. He never affected the style or language of the sacred scriptures. His language was plain, simple and graphic – his manner earnest and impressive. His utterances always commanded respect, and awakened deep and thoughtful consideration from those who heard him. His deportment was uniformly chaste and respectable and marked by a passive dignity.

In his method of thought he was analytical, and, in his line of argument varying between the inductive and logical. He spoke with ease and apparently without effort in a natural and simple, yet elegant flow of language, to express a deep current of metaphysical reasoning and ethical thought.

He penetrated his auditor, apparently without intending to do so, and moved them without knowing it. Physically he was indolent and fond of ease. The writer once watched him, undiscovered, as he was working in his nursery, near “the Big Bend“ in the Creek near Mansfield. He lay in the shade of a spreading thorn tree in the centre of his nursery, and, there, lying on his side he reached out with his hoe and extirpated such weeds as were within his reach only.

He preferred sleeping upon the floors of farmers, as, he said that the indulgence in the luxury of soft beds would soon be get a bad habit which he could not hope to indulge in his varied method of living.

This man cherished the kindest feelings towards all living things. His every act and step in life manifested this attribute as the pervading trait of his nature. He was as tender and as innocent as a child, and as easily moved to tears by the sorrows of others, or even the sufferings of animals. He has been known to pay the full value of horses in their flesh, take them from the harness, and, with a blessing, turn them to the luxurious pastures of the wilderness to become their own masters. He was never without money, and frequently furnished the housewives with a pound or two of tea at great expense, at that time, although he held that the indulgence in that aromatic luxury was a dissipation.

He bought six break plates at the store of E.P. Sturges, and, upon being asked what use he had for so many plates, he replied that he would save dish-washing by having so many; that by eating his meals upon a plate he need not wash dishes more than once a week.

The truth is he carried the plates to a poor family near the Spring Mills who a few days before had the misfortune of losing the most of their table furniture by an accident.

John Chapman was a man of noble instincts. He loved the good for the sake of the good. He cherished the pure for the reward it brought him, a pure soul, a high life and self approbation.

Long will his name be cherished as a household word, and his memory be treasured as a landmark of virtue and goodness by the few that remain who measured his kindness and goodness by the benefits of which they were the immediate recipients.” — Coffinberry, C.S. Another Article On Johnny Appleseed (From the Mansfield Shield and Banner). In: Bucyrus, Ohio: Telegraph-Forum. Saturday, 16 December 1871. Page 2, col. 2.

Johnny Appleseed – Further Particulars. Defiance, Ohio (1871)

“The November issue of Harper‘s New Monthly Magazine contains a story from the pen of William D. Haley, concerning a cosmopolitan who among the pioneers of Allen County and Fort Wayne was well known, and whose eccentricities made him an anomaly. These were seen so often and his dress became so familiar, that for the time being he was regarded with but little interest; but as time has crowded the period in which he lived and the incidents then transpiring so far into the past, the hero of the story and his eccentricities are become history, and as such the fresh, living and enterprising generation loves to draw them from the faded memories of those whose lives embrace a part of two important periods in the history of the place.

The drapery of the picture which Mr. Haley has offered in Harper, is natural and rich, his wood-cut representations of the hero well conceived, and, taken altogether, his story is as accurate as it was possible for one to make it who was not personally acquainted with the hero, familiar with the whole scope of country embraced in his wanderings, and with his property, and not the least the circumstances of his death and burial.

Mr. Haley introduces Johnny Appleseed as having the true patronymic of Jonathan Chapman, in which he is mistaken. His name was John Chapman, as I find in looking over the papers of his estate which was settled in the Probate Court of this county. For instance, two notes were filed against his estate. One dated at Franklin, supposed to be on the Great Miami River, Ohio, February, 1804, payable to Nathaniel Chapman [Ed: his brother], one year after said date, for $100 – “in apple trees or land”. The other $100 payable to some minor children named Rudde, of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when they became of age, both of which were signed by John Chapman. And the better evidence of his name was to be found in the purchases of land which he made in this county, as well as in Adams and Jay counties. The muniments of title, which he held, were in the name of John Chapman.

He had a sister in Adams or Jay county, married to a man whose name I, trusting to memory, will call Broom, and he was living probably at his death.

In the particulars of his name, and that he never owned any real estate, save a piece of land in Ohio, and the time of his coming to the Maumee valley, and the date of his death, Mr. Haley is much at fault – otherwise probably right.

John Chapman came here long before 1838, as Mr. Haley states it; but the exact period is not known. One gentleman, a pioneer of this place, fixes it as early as 1825 – others some later; but certain is it, that in 1830, he was seen one autumn day, seated in a section of a hollow tree which he improvised for a boat, laden with apple seed fresh from the cider presses of a more eastern part of the country, paddling up the Maumee river, and landing at Wayne’s Fort, at the head of Main Street, Fort Wayne. He kept the seed wet for preservation. His boat was dubbed with mud and tree-moss, and looked quite in comport with his rough garb, untidy appearance and eccentric habits. His vade mecum was his New Testament and a few volumes concerning the Church of the New Jerusalem, founded by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish Baron in the eighteenth century. His wardrobe was on his person – and was so scanty that he appeared as a beggar. His footgear gently consisted of odd shoes – or a shoe in a boot – now and then only one foot covered, the other bare, to chastise it for a transgression, as he declared. His head gear rarely ever alike for a long time – sometimes a crownless hat, limbered with rough usage, which he often ran his hand through and carried on his arm – sometimes a tin vessel worn on his head, which he used to cook his frugal meals in, and sometimes another hat which had a crown, and which he wore over the first and the tin vessel – and in the crown of which thus nested over two, he carried his testament and Swedenborgian books, which latter as they were replenished, he said, contained “news fresh from Heaven”, and which he was ever ready to read from – always reclining on the floor or ground, to those who stopped to listen to him or who expressed a desire to hear new tiding fresh from Heaven. Mr. Haley has well pictured the hero of the story in the act of giving this “news fresh from Heaven“, and nowhere does he do it irreverently towards the doctrines which assume that their founder had been permitted to enjoy open intercourse with the world of departed spirits. Why should he, when so distinguished a prelate as Dr. Adam Smith and “others will see nothing improbable in all this referring the case to those extraordinary dispensations of the providence of an all-wise and all-powerful being who, in all ages of the world, has been pleased to enlighten and instruct chosen servants concerning His will and Kingdom.“ This language of Dr. Smith seems very strongly put, in the light of our present civilization, which would accept the quotation if it read “others will see nothing impossible” etc. But to accept it as emanated from the learned Doctor would, to be consistent, make us not incredulous as to the doctrines of the Koran, or the legends and pretended miracles in the lives of the Romish Saints.

Mr. Haley has given sublime a picture of one of these séances of Johnny Appleseed, that we are induced to quote it.

“What a scene is presented to our imagination! The interior of a primitive cabin, the wide, open fireplace, where a few sticks are burning beneath the iron pot in which the evening meal is cooking; around the fireplace the attentive group, composed of the sturdy pioneer and his wife and children, listening with a reverential awe to the “news right fresh from heaven” and reclining on the floor, clad in rags, but with his gray hairs glorified by the beams of the setting sun that flood through the open door and the unchinked logs of the humble building, this poor wanderer, with a gift of genius and eloquence, who believes with the faith of apostles and martyrs that God has appointed him a mission in the wilderness to preach the gospel of love, and plant apple seeds that shall produce orchards for the benefit of men and women and little children whom he has never seen. If there is a sublimer faith or a more genuine eloquence in richly decorated cathedrals and under brocade vestments, it would be worth a long journey to find it.”

He devoutly believed that his physical mortification on earth insured him a greater fullness of celestial bliss; hence his self denial as to personal comfort and wants, even such, in very many instances, as were necessary to give sustenance to the body, and protection against the rude inclemencies of the seasons and against the envenomed bite of the reptiles that lay in his pathway, or crept stealthily upon his repose in the wilderness.

In the autumn of 1830, on his arrival here in his rude boat laden with his apple seeds, he planted a nursery on what was then called the Taylor farm, near the canal lock, just east of the city – another at that time, perhaps on the Taber farm, now called, just below the city on the north side of the river Maumee, and then taking a quantity of apple seed he journeyed to Elkhart Prairie, near Goshen, now; and there, he said, planted another nursery, and returned here. How soon there after, or whether before, he planted the one on the south bank of the Maumee river, about ten miles from here, in Milan Township, is unknown but it was long prior to 1838 for the autumn of that year, I passed down the river in company with Colonel John Spencer, now deceased, crossing that stream at its bends and was shown by Colonel Spencer the orchard which Johnny Appleseed, before that time, had planted – the trees in which told that they had been planted at least six or eight years before – the very nursery which was inventoried as of his personal estate, and which contained then 15,000 trees, and on his own land – a fraction. Another he planted somewhere somewhat later on the St. Mary’s, about nine miles up from the city, south side. Another on the land of David Archer, now owned by Mr. Emmanuel Rudisill, at the north west corner of Southland, on the St. Joseph Road, and I have an indistinct recollection of having seen another about 1840, just below the village of Shanesville, where, or near where, Fort Adams once stood. When this latter was planted, whether before he made Fort Wayne his headquarters in 1830, and while he was roaming the wilds of Ohio, spoken of by Mr. Halley, it is perhaps not now known.

Mr. Haley has well described his personal appearance, his short voice, etc., and those who knew him here will know him by that description. But his garb was not always alike, and some have seen him in other garbs and under other circumstances and those noted by Mr. Haley, so that someone would describe him in one way and some another. He rarely ate at the table with others, and never slept in a bed. He preferred to lie on the floor of a tavern or private house – always laid in the bar room at the hotel, when stopping there, and, when necessary, kept fire during the night. Exceedingly penurious, he complained of tavern charges and thought a sixpence quite enough for a meal. At stated times he would work, often coming to this place at the season of corn gathering and hiring to do that work. Captain James Barnett, deceased, used to say that Johnny Appleseed was the best hand he hired to husk corn, and always gave the old pioneer a place to stay when he desired.

This is no invidious mention, for there were many others who used to give him a place. John Rogers, Esquire, now living and an octogenarian, Absalom Holcomb, now deceased, and others. He was regarded as a temperate man, and so he was, but occasionally he would take a dram of spirits to keep him a little warm, as he said. He did not believe in marriage on earth, but held that he was raising a girl to be his spiritual wife in the new Jerusalem, to gain which all his life was a sacrifice. And on one occasion a gentleman now living, with whom he often lodged and ate, and who had a little daughter whom the old man fancied, was asking him if he would give him the child for a spiritual wife, and on thoughtlessly giving him his consent, Johnny regarded the bargain as sacred, and treated the child thereafter with much care. This, however, was interrupted by an accident. A neighbor’s children came over to see this child and others of the family, when the father told a little boy to kiss Johnny’s girl, which he did in Johnny’s presence. This was considered by Johnny as a violation of faith plighted by the father, and in anger declined to further care for his spiritual wife. The name of this boy I withhold, lest a very worthy gentleman, long my friend, and high in the esteem of the people of this county, might be the subject of a joke. He is a husband and father now, and perhaps in no other instance has ever parted a man and wife, and this unconsciously.

Our hero may be considered as insane by those who ever knew him, but while this was not true his fanaticism made him a religious monomaniac. I have seen him under many circumstances, and public meetings, in private talks, and courts of justice, and at religious meetings, and never heard a disorderly word fall from his lips. In the year 1841, at a camp meeting, the first, perhaps, ever held by the Methodists in this county – it was on the side of Lindenwood cemetery, near a spring of water on the north side – I saw him lying on the ground, near a large tree in good hearing of the pulpit; and I now have a distinct recollection of the earnest attention he gave to the eloquent words of the clergyman, who discoursed of that New Jerusalem which our hero hoped to reach, and there carry on his now earthy occupation among the sacramental hosts around the throne of God.

The wood-cut in Harper which represents a well-fed and dressed preacher somewhere in Ohio discoursing eloquently against extravagance of dress, etc., and where Johnny Appleseed went forward and amazed the divine by presenting himself as a “primitive Christian”, dressed in a coffee sack and barefoot – I say this represents a scene which actually transpired, and is confirmed by an incident which occurred at this place a little later. A certain Adam Payne, who was also an eccentric man, but in a different way, a preacher of a very illiterate kind, he wanted to appear a second Lorenzo Dow, in 1830 came to the city, and standing on a box on the northeast corner of Clinton and Columbia streets, announced himself thus: “Hear ye! Hear ye! I am now about to scold the devil.” Having finished his scold, Johnny Appleseed being present, went forward and asked Mr. Payne if he recollected “the primitive Christian” which he had before seen in Mansfield, Ohio. Payne at once recognized him. Now, if this Reverend Adam Payne were the veritable itinerant missionary who appeared in Ohio and preached in Mansfield to an open air congregation, as Mr. Haley has it, he certainly gives the picture too much color when he calls him the “well-clothed missionary” for Adam Payne was as poor as Johnny Appleseed, of very plain dress, and wore long hair and a long beard; and, aside from tattered apparel, would have mated Johnny Appleseed very well.

Mr. Haley states the incident of Appleseed confronting the “itinerant missionary” toward the latter part of Johnny‘s career in Ohio; and this is confirmed by the incident of recognition related above as taking place at Fort Wayne, in the year 1830.

Right here a circumstance comes just in play to fix with some accuracy the time of Johnny’s advent to this region. Adam Payne was a very near neighbor of my father – in fact the parents of Payne lived on our farm as early as 1816 in the county of Dearborn, Indiana, while the Indians were still numerous. He was given to eccentricities, and was an itinerant preacher, wore long beard and long hair, and some later than the period named, but before my memory, he and his parents immigrated to the wilds of Western Illinois, and but little was heard from him for many years, till one summer day in the year 1831, a steamboat landed at the wharf at Lawrenceburgh, on the Ohio River, and put off an aged couple and their scanty effects. I was then residing there with my brother-in-law, Colonel Spencer, but once recognized them as Mr. and Mrs. Payne, Sr. They were taken to my father’s house in the country, where they were kept over a year, and then removed to the county asylum, where they died. From these old people it was ascertained that Adam Payne, their son, had been killed by the Indians, and his head severed from his body, and carried on a pole as a trophy. Those who may read this, and who are of 45 years of age, will recollect what ravages were committed on western settlers by the Indians before the Blackhawk War of 1832. It was these depredations, and the loss of their son Adam, which caused these aged pilgrims to return to Dearborn County to die.

Adam Payne was here in 1830, and is known to have been killed by the Indians, and his body treated as above described, somewhere in the northern part of the state, soon after his visit here.

I have introduced this incident to give accuracy to the date of Appleseed’s advent into the Maumee valley; and this incident of Adam Payne’s and Appleseed’s meeting here to support the supposition that Payne was the identical itinerant missionary of whom Mr. Haley writes in Harper. If the circumstances do not fix it, the date then perhaps is lost. Still it is only essential as a bit of local history. For all that related to our hero in Ohio, and the relation of a beautiful story in elegant diction, I refer the reader to Harper’s Monthly for November, 1871.

Now to the close of Appleseed’s life. Mr. Healy gives obituary verse: “In his summer of 1847, when his labors had literally extended over 100,000 square miles of territory, at the close of a warm day, after travelling twenty miles, he entered the house of a settler in Allen County, Indiana, and was, as usual, warmly welcomed. He declined to eat with the family, but accepted some bread and milk, which he partook of sitting on the doorstep and gazing on the setting sun. Later in the evening he delivered his “news fresh from Heaven” by reading the Beatitudes. Declining other accommodations, he slept, as usual, on the floor, and early in the morning he was found with his features all aglow with a supernal light, and his body so near death that his tongue refused its office. Thus died &c.”

This is a beautiful close. Johnny Appleseed died on 11 March, 1845, at the house of William Worth, in St. Joseph Township, Allen County, Indiana, on the land now owned by Jesse Cole, on the feeder canal, and was buried in a reasonable time thereafter, at the family burying ground set apart by David Archer, deceased, now owned by Mr. Emmanuel Rudisill and may be seen by the passer up the towing path of the feeder, occupying a beautiful natural mound. At the east side of this mound, near its foot, Johnny Appleseed was buried, and a stone was then put up to mark the spot, by our townsman, Samuel L Flutter, who attended his dying hours, dressed his body, laid it out and made his coffin. These are indisputable, and are in general confirmed by the papers on file in the Probate Court, where his estate was eleven years in being “gobbled up” – from April, 1845, till the summer of 1856.

Appleseed died with a disease then prevalent here, and commonly called the winter plague. His age I will give as seventy-two, according to Mr. Haley. His illness lasted about two weeks. Mr. and Mrs. Worth were his friends, and had, long years before, given him a place in the cabin when he sought it. They too have long since died, leaving a name for hospitality and goodness.

Mr. Flutter tells me that Appleseed had on, when he died, next his body, a coarse coffee-sack, with a hole cut in the centre through which he passed his head. He had on the waists of four pairs of pants. These were cut off at the forks, ripped up at the sides and the front thrown away, saving the waistband attached to the hinder part. These hinder parts were buttoned around him, lapping like shingles so as to cover the whole lower part of his body, and over all these were drawn a pair of what was once pantaloons. In this garb he died as he had lived. Says Mr. Haley: “He never infected pain or knew an enemy, a man of strange habits in whom there dwelt a comprehensive love that reached with one hand downward to the lowest forms of life, and with the other upward to the very throne of God. A laboring, self-denying benefactor of his race, homeless, solitary and ragged, he trod the thorny earth with bare and bleeding feet, intent only on making the wilderness fruitful”. Be not surprised – he loved and served his God.

His religious belief was then as now, peculiar – but since that period it has gained more strength. But we are not, we cannot deprecate it, for it is the fruit of those seeds which were born upon the wind from Wycliffe rectory at Lutterworth, which abided in the earth as those of our Protestant religion, “until they have sprung into the stately growth of centuries.”

Standing as we do now so far in advance of those times, and looking up on the results of a great civilization, and comparing them with those of centuries in the past, we fully partake of the inspiration of the poet:

“We are living, we are acting,
In a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling –
To be living is sublime.”

I have thus with a hurried pen given for local reading, what Mr. Haley has done with greater care and ability for national reading, and hope it will be received with allowance for unavoidable errors.” — Dawson, John W. Johnny Appleseed – Further Particulars. Defiance, Ohio: Defiance Democrat. Saturday, 23 December 1871. Page 3, col. 5.

Johnny Appleseed: A Chat with a Man Who Knew The Pioneer Prophet. Leavenworth, Kansas (1888)

“Yes,” said Dr. [William] Bushnell. “I knew Johnny Appleseed well, and he was one of the most remarkable characters I have ever met.”

These were the words of one of the oldest physicians in the state of Ohio. Dr. Bushnell has long since passed the time which the Bible allots as the natural life of man. His hair is as white as the driven snow, but his step is steady and his mind is clear. He has been for years well-known through northern Ohio, and had the honour of being entertained by the king during the international congress of doctors at Sweden some years ago. The king asked the doctor to visit him at his country seat, and he wanted him to prescribe for his wife. He was surprised to find that so old a man would dare to cross the water, and he asked the doctor many questions about this country. I had been chatting with Dr. Bushnell about early days in Ohio, and the conversation turned to Jonathan [John] Chapman, that strange character who was so well noted in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana during the early days. He brought bags of apple seeds with him and planted orchards all over the west, doing the whole rather as an act of charity than with a view of making money out of his work. He was a philosopher and a preacher, as well as a nursery man, and he was one of the queerest cranks of pioneer history.

Said Dr. Bushnell: “Johnny Appleseed was not, I think, insane, and he was certainly not weak minded. He used to come to my house when he passed through this part of the country. He was a small, wiry man, with thin lips, dark face and long, dark hair. His eyes were black and sharp and piercing. He had a pleasant smile, but his face was usually sober, and as to his dress, it was as fantastic and dilapidated as you can imagine. It was made up of cast off garments which he had gotten in exchange for apple trees or seeds, and he cared nothing at all for appearances. I have seen him at times when his chief garment was a coffee sack with a hole at the top of his head to pass through and one on each side for his arms.”

“He never wore shoes except in the coldest weather. He said that shoes hurt his feet, and he could get along better without them. At one time I remember he was at Sandusky, on Lake Erie, and he wanted to go to Buffalo to the cider mills there for a load of apple seeds. It was in the depth of winter, and the lake was frozen over; he was in his bare feet, and he expected to walk. Some kind hearted citizens of Sandusky gave him a pair of shoes and forced them upon him. He started off, walking on the ice. He told me that by the time he had gotten a few miles away from Sandusky he found his feet very cold, and he concluded it was the shoes that made them so. In order to test it he took off one shoe, and went with one foot bare. ‘I found,‘ said he, ‘that this foot was much warmer than the other, and I then took off the other shoe and threw them both as far as I could throw them. I walked in my bare feet on the ice to Buffalo, and I got along very comfortably.‘

“As to Johnny Appleseed‘s hat,“ continued Dr. Bushnell, “he wore anything he could get that would cover his head, and he usually had a baseboard visor, which he tied over his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun. He usually carried a tin vessel along with him, in which he cooked his mush, and during a part of his life he wore the tin vessel on his head between times as a hat. It was an ordinary tin pan. He was plain in his diet, and his stomach did not trouble him. He preferred vegetable foods and more, and he did not believe in wasting anything. At one time it was said that he took some bread out of a slop bucket at a pioneer’s cabin, and reproved the woman of the house for wasting God’s food.“

“He was very kind to animals, was he not?“

“Yes; he got his seeds in western Pennsylvania, and near Buffalo, and he brought them to Ohio on horses. He would take old, broken down, cast off steeds, feed them and drive them along with him to the east. At the cider mills he would soak the mash of the cider, the refuse of the apples, in barrels of water, and the seeds would fall to the bottom. He would lay them out to dry, and when he had gotten about two bushels he would put them in a bag of leather and load them on one of these broken down horses. He often carried one of these bags himself under his arm and against his hip, and he would often bring several horse loads of them on his western journey. After he was through with the horses he would turn them loose or give them to some pioneer, urging them to be kind to them.”

“As to his own treatment of the animal creation, I have heard him express the greatest regret for having killed a snake, and it is said that he often put out his campfire at night when it attracted the mosquitoes and flies. It was near here that he had his trouble with a yellow jacket nest, the story of which has been often told. He was working, I think, at one of his orchards when he stepped upon this colony of yellow jackets. One of them crawled up his pants leg, and, although it stung him terribly, he gently forced it down, pressing the cloth carefully in order that he might not hurt it. He told the bystanders that it would not be right to take the life of the poor thing, as it did not intend to hurt him.“

“Where did Johnny Appleseed come from?“ I asked.

“I talked to him about his career,“ replied the white haired doctor. “He was born, I think, in Massachusetts, and his crankiness came from being crossed in love. He used to refer indirectly to this at times, and he was not particularly fond of the society of women, though he was always respectful to them. It was after he had been jilted by the girl to whom it was that he was engaged that he took to walking about and reading Swedenborgian books, and later on he came westward on his mission. This mission was to circulate the doctrines of Swedenborg and to plant apple trees. He carried his books in a pocket, made by pulling his shirt halfway out of his pantaloons, and he stuck these back into this place through the open bosom of his shirt when he was through. He would tear a book to pieces, leaving a fragment at one cabin, another at another, and so on, and he called his books “news fresh from heaven“. He would often read them aloud, lying down on the floor of the cabin as he did so, and he always slept on the floor with his feet towards the fire. I have often offered him a bed when he was here, but he always refused it. He was a good talker, too, and he was nobody’s fool.“

“Was he a man of culture?“

“Well, hardly that, but he had good common sense as to many things, and he undoubtedly did great good. He was something of a doctor in his way, and he had one cure for sores and bruises which he considered invaluable. If he bruised or wounded his foot he would apply a red-hot iron to the affected part, and thus made a burn which he could heal. I remember a man here who had a very sore leg, the shin of which was broken out in boils, and which he had tried for years to cure. He told Johnny Appleseed of it, and Johnny said he could cure him. He asked to see the sores and the man rested his leg up on a chair and laid them bare. It was in front of the fireplace, and Johnny snatched up a burning ember and before the man knew what he was about he had grabbed his leg by the ankle and rapidly rolled the red-hot coal over the sores. The man screamed and yelled, but Johnny held on until he had completed his work. Whether it cured the man I am unable to say.

“Johnny Appleseed,“ Dr. Bushnell went on, “did not seem to feel pain. I have seen him thrust pins into his legs and arms without quivering. He was a crank on the subject of dog fennel as ague cure, and he planted the seeds of this weed as well as apples.“

“How did he plant his trees?“

“He usually chose the most fertile spots, and he sometimes cleared the land and other times used clearings which the Indians had used. He saved the seeds at times, and sometimes put in bushels to the acre. After he had planted a nursery he put a fence around it and he generally engaged some pioneer in the vicinity to look after it on condition that he should have a part of the trees. When his trees were grown he sold them to such pioneers as could afford to pay for them, and gave them to those that could not. He sometimes took notes, but he never asked a man to pay him any money that was due him, and he would take old clothes or anything else that he might need at the time in exchange for apple trees. He planted trees over fully 100 square miles of territory, and he first came into Ohio in 1801. In 1806 he had two canoes on the Ohio river, and he brought them to the state loaded with apple seeds. He did a great deal of good among the pioneers, and he several times warned them of the approach of the Indians. He was treated well by the Indians as well as by the whites. And his orchards are still in existence all over the state. He believes that trees should be raised from the seed and not grafted. And he thought the apple was the most beautiful thing in fruit.“

“How did he die?“

“He was in the western part of Indiana when he overdid himself in trying to reach one of his orchards which he was told the deer had entered and were eating the trees. Typhoid fever raged, and he died in Indiana at the age of 72. He felt that his day was passing away with the march of civilization, and I don’t think he was impressed with the improvements of modern times.”

“It was here at Mansfield he took down the circuit riding preacher, as has been published in the history of Richland County. This preacher was denouncing the sins of this life and the follies of dress. He was urging the men to be more simple in their ways and the women to tear the flowers from their bonnets, to sell their golden jewellery and give the proceeds to the Lord. At last he said: ‘The primitive Christians have passed away; we have now no more saints on earth. Where, my hearers, will you now find the barefooted Christian travelling on his road to heaven? ‘

“At this a loud voice was heard. The eyes of the crowd turned, and, lying under a tree in the back of the square in his coffee sack shirt and with his bare feet held high up in the air Johnny Appleseed yelled out: ‘Here, parson, here is your primitive Christian!‘“

During this talk Dr. Bushnell showed me a sketch of Johnny Appleseed, which was drawn for a local novel of this region, and titled “Philip Seymour“, and it is from this that the drawings in the present letter are made. The doctor says it is a good representation of this strangest of characters.” — Stephens, Henry. Johnny Appleseed: A Chat with a Man Who Knew The Pioneer Prophet. Leavenworth, Kansas: The Leavenworth Weekly Times. Thursday, 16 August 1888. Page 6, col. 1.

A Unique Character (1891)

Johnny Appleseed. Perhaps demented. Perhaps as sane as the average person, but wearied of civilization. A man who harmed nothing and no one, but who added his mite, in a humble way, to the pleasures of the generations that came after him. A unique figure in the days of the stalwart pioneer. A welcome guest of the red man, a friend of the white, a benefactor of the Commonwealth.

On the banks of the Muskingum, along the White Woman or Walhonding, up the several forks of the Mohican, bearing golden fruit at the present day, are scores of living monuments to his untiring and unselfish labor. Within a rod of the great Pennsylvania Company’s railway tracks, in the heart of the manufacturing industries of the thriving city of Mansfield, Ohio, still flourishes a pioneer apple orchard planted by the eccentric character. Here John Chapman, in the first decade of the century, had one of his numerous nurseries, and to it many of the apple orchards for miles round about owe their origin.

It has been settled that John Chapman was born at Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1775 [Ed: In fact, Leominster, Mass., 1774]. Legend says that he made his appearance on the Potomac, in the vicinity of the mountains, in 1790. It is a fact that his father, who was twice married, located at Marietta, Ohio, in 1801. The family consisted of John (Johnny Appleseed), Lucy, Patty, Nathaniel, Perley, Abner (a mute), Mary, Jonathan (a mute), Davis and Sally. Subsequently the family moved to Duck Creek, where the father died and is now buried.

John Chapman made his appearance in central Ohio and earned the name that is gone down in early history, along between 1806–11. One authority says the first orchard originated by him was on the farm of Isaac Stadden, in Licking County, on the banks of the stream by that name, near the city of Newark, in 1801. A Jefferson County pioneer says the first time he saw the quaint character was in 1836. Johnny was descending the Ohio River in two canoes lashed together laden with apple seeds from Pennsylvania cider presses. His destination was the headwaters of the Mohican in Ashland and Richland counties, which he expected to reach by ascending the Muskingum, and thence the Walhonding.

The canoe was his mode of transportation while not remote from his sources of supplies, but on the extreme frontier an old horse was pressed into service, or he was content to trudge over hill and through dale afoot with a leathern bag strapped to his back. These streams, at this day, were navigable for canoes as far as Mansfield, and the Killbuck bore flat boats loaded with salt as far as Worcester, in Wayne County. As he proceeded on his way he would select an eligible site, clear a small patch of ground, surround it with a rude fence, and plant his seeds. When his stock was exhausted he returned to the source of his supply, and again started into the wilderness.

Thus were originated nurseries all over the eastern half of Ohio, near streams tributary to the Muskingum. If a settler wanted trees he took them and paid for them in money, clothing or board, or gave his note to Johnny the next time he saw him. In one instance only did he come into the possession of a real estate — in Ashland County — but the deeds were never recorded, and litigation in the Ashland County courts was had over this land a few years ago.

John Chapman was a man of strict morals and a firm Christian. He believed in the doctrines of Emmanuel Swedenborg, and claimed to converse with spirits. In the bosom of his shirt he always carried Swedenborgian works and the New Testament, and these he faithfully read.

Miss Rosella Rice, recently deceased, a native of Ashland County, thus described Johnny to the writer: “He was such a good, kind, generous man that he thought it was wrong to spend money on clothing to be worn for appearance. He thought that if he was comfortably clad, and in attire that suited the weather, it was sufficient. His head-covering was often a pasteboard hat of his own making, with one broad side, which he wore next the sun to protect his face. It was a very unsightly object, to be sure, and yet never one of us children ventured to laugh at it. We held the old man in tender regard. Mother told us how for a long time he had made a tin vessel do double duty as a head-covering and a coffee pot.

“His pantaloons were always old, scant and short, with some sort of a substitute for ‘gallows ‘ or suspenders. He never wore a coat except in midwinter; and his feet were knobby and horny and frequently bare. Sometimes he wore old shoes, but if he had none, and the rough paths hurt his feet, he substituted sandals his own handiwork — rude soles with thong fastenings. I have often seen him attired in a coffee sack as a coat, with holes cut in it for the arms. The bosom of his shirt was always pulled out loosely, making a kind of a pouch, in which he carried his books. All the orchards in the white settlement came from the nurseries of Johnny’s planting. Even now, after these many years, and though this region of country is densely populated, I can count from my window no less than five orchards, or remains of orchards, that were once trees taken from his nurseries.

“He carried his seeds in the leathern socks because the dense underbrush, brambles and thorny thickets would have made it unsafe for the coffee sack. I remember very distinctly falling over one of Johnny’s well-filled sacks early one morning, immediately on rising. It was still dark at the head of the stairs and the sack was not there when I went to bed. Johnny had arrived during the night and put the sack upstairs while he lay on the kitchen floor with his poor old horny feet to the wood fire. I never heard of him sleeping in a bed. I should judge there was a bushel and a half of seeds in the sack, and it was so full that instead of being tied and leaving a hand-hold it was snuggly sewed up, and one end was as smooth as the other. It must have been as difficult to carry as a box of the same size and shape. Father said that Johnny always carried a fore stick, or any big stick for the fire place, on his hip. Perhaps that was the way he carried that ungainly leathern sack.

“Father told me that in 1806 Johnny planted 16 bushels of apple seeds on one farm on the Walhonding river. Think of the patience in gathering that many apple seeds by hand, and the labour of hoeing them into the ground.

“There was romance in Johnny’s early days. He had loved, and his love had proved false. When quite a young man he had provided a home for a friendless child, sent her to school, clothed her, and hoped to marry her, but when scarce 15 she gave herself to another young man. That was the story Johnny told, and as he told it, young as I was, I now remember how his gray eyes grew dark as violet, the pupils enlarged, and his voice rose, while his nostrils dilated and his thin lips worked with emotion.

On the subject of apples he was charmingly enthusiastic. His descriptive powers were poetical, his language remarkably well chosen. He was scrupulously honest, and just tender as a girl. He was never known to give any living thing pain.

“At the period to which my memory carries me, Johnny Appleseed was rather below the medium height, very quick in action and conversation, nervous and restless. He had gray eyes, which were piercing, and wore his hair and scanty beard long. His diet usually consisted, when he could get it, of milk, fruits, vegetables, seldom meats and never veal, as he said there should be a land flowing with milk and honey, and therefore the calves should be spared. He believed it was sinful to kill for food.“

The years on either side of 1812 were full of excitement to the sturdy men and women who were planting an empire in the wilderness. While the settlers were being tortured and killed by the savages, Johnny Appleseed went to and fro unharmed. Even the wild beasts and the treacherous reptiles, even the rattlesnakes, of which the section of country spoken was the home, seem to have an understanding as to Johnny. Once, and once only, did the snake venture to punish him, and the accident is told thus:

He was mowing a patch of land on a prairie preparatory to starting a nursery when a rattlesnake bit him. Describing the event, with a sigh, he said: “Poor fellow; he only touched me, when I, in an ungodly passion, put the heel of my scythe on him and went home. When I went back for my scythe there lay the poor fellow dead.“

Johnny slept in the woods oftener than in the cabin. One autumn night while lying before a fire in the forest he noticed that the mosquitoes flew into the blaze and perished. He rose, filled the tin mush, or coffee, pot which he wore on his head, with water and quenched the flame, remarking: “God forbid that I should build a fire for my comfort that should be the means of destroying any of his creatures.“

Once he went barefooted, carrying the shoe for weeks, because the foot had accidentally stepped up on a snake. On another occasion he built a fire at the end of a hollow log intending to camp there for the night, but finding the log inhabited by a bear and her cubs removed the fire to the other end and slept in the snow in the open air rather than disturb her. It is also told that during one of Johnny’s sojourns at Mansfield an itinerant preacher was delivering a sermon in the open air with his congregation scattered around him. Johnny was lying on the ground. The preacher had become very severe on the growing extravagance of the pioneers and exclaimed several times: “Where is the primitive Christian travelling to heaven barefooted and in coarse raiment?“ Finally, even Johnny’s patience wore out, and raising his bare feet and pointing to his coffee sack, he answered, much to the confusion of the speaker: “Here, here’s your primitive Christian!“

I have said the Indians treated Johnny with great kindness. The Delawares had been located in villages at Jeromeville and Greentown, Ashland County, and although the Greentown Indians numbered several hundred, were Christians and half-civilized, living in some 60 log cabins, the military tore them from their homes and, notwithstanding the promise to Captain Pipe to preserve their village, the soldiers flames to the huts of Greentown and it was totally destroyed including the large council house.

The result was the massacre of several families, and the settlers for many miles around fled to the block houses at Mansfield, Mount Vernon and elsewhere for protection.

Johnny Appleseed conveyed information of the uprising from cabin to cabin as far south as Mount Vernon, refusing food and denying himself all rest, tramping night and day. As he approached a cabin he shouted: “The tribes of the heathen are around about your doors, and a devouring flame followeth after him,“ and with a few words of explanation he was off again.

Judge C. S. Coffinberry, late of Cleveland, thus recounts one of Johnny’s midnight visits: “Although I was but a mere child, I can remember, as if it were but yesterday, the warning cry of Johnny Appleseed as he stood before my father’s log cabin door on that awful night. The cabin stood where now stands the old North American Hotel in the city of Mansfield. I remember the precise language, the clear loud voice, the deliberate exclamations, and the fearful thrill it awoke in my bosom: “Fly! Fly! For your lives! The Indians are murdering and scalping the Seymores and the Copuses.”

“These were his words. My father sprang to the door, but the messenger was gone and midnight silence reigned without.“

John Chapman was a regularly constituted minister of the Church of the New Jerusalem, and a constituted missionary of that faith under the authority of the association at Boston. He had credentials to that effect. He was also supplied with tracts of that church, which he distributed, and when he didn’t have sufficient to go round he tore them to pieces and left a part at one house and the second part at another, and so on, and after being welcomed to the frontier home he would lie down upon the floor, open the New Testament and eloquently read “some news write fresh from Heaven“, as he put it, surrounded by the pioneer household hushed in awe.

Whereas this eccentric person benefitted mankind by planting fruit trees, he also mistakenly thought to, in the same manner, bless him by spreading the medicinal herbs of the other sections of the country. Thus he dropped a handful of dog fennel, pennywell, catnip, hoarhound, mullen or rattle-root seed or the seed of some other medicinal plant of the housewife, along his path in his journeys, especially at the wayside near dwellings. In fact he inflicted an evil, when he sought to do good, for the rank fennel lines our highways and borders our lands and steals into our door yards and has become a pest.

The year 1836 — 35 years after his first appearance in the Ohio valley, the country had grown too densely inhabited for this child of the forest, and two years later we find him permanently removed to Indiana.

In the spring of 1847 [Ed: this is an error. Chapman died in 1845], being within 15 miles of one of his nurseries on the St. Joseph River, he was informed that cattle had broken into his nursery, and were destroying his trees. He started immediately for the place. It was a warm day and at its close he entered the house of a friend and was cordially received, but declined to eat anything except some bread and milk, which he ate sitting on the doorstep gazing on the setting sun.

Before retiring, he for the last time read in an eloquent voice, “fresh news right from Heaven“, and declining a bed lay down upon the floor as had been his custom through life.

A fever had settled upon him. In the morning the “beautiful light supernal was upon his countenance“, the death angel had touched him during the silence of darkness, and his tongue refused to perform its office. The physician declared that he had never seen a dying man so perfectly calm and placid, and inquired as to his religious belief. “We buried him,“ says Mr. Worth, “in David Archer‘s graveyard, two and one-half miles north of Fort Wayne.“

A monument of stone was erected in 1882 at the scene of the massacre by the Delaware Indians of the soldiers, the Zimmers, the Copuses and the heroic Dutchman Martin Ruffner, in Richland County, Ohio, and on it is graven the name of Johnny Appleseed, a humble, homeless man; and unselfish benefactor of mankind, whose memory is fragrant with good deeds.” — Hahn, George U. A Unique Character. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh Dispatch. Sunday, 3 May 1891. Page 10, col. 6. (Note: This list omits Elizabeth).