The essential johnny cash

Every kid in America knows the legend of Johnny Appleseed. Now, here's the whole story.

When the American Midwest was still virgin territory unspoiled by rails or roads, a hero sowed promise in its fertile soil. Described in a magazine article as "a small wiry man, full of restless activity," he had long dark hair, a board, and "keen black eyes that sparkled with a peculiar brightness." To himself, he was merely a "gatherer and planter of apple seeds."

Apple trees have come to be synonymous with the moniker of John Chapman, the much-beloved folk hero better known as Johnny Appleseed. But while every kid in America can tell you what Johnny Appleseed did, most probably don't know why.

Legend status notwithstanding, John Chapman was actually a shrewd businessman who played a pivotal role in the American population's shift west during the early 19th century. That's because he provided the means for the first settlers to grow their own apples, and apples meant subsistence and self-reliance.

Fresh apples and apple butter were staples in settlers' diets; boiled apple cider and vinegar enabled them to preserve foods. Apple cider (what we today call hard cider), a basic drink, could be traded for flour, sugar, livestock, and other staples in cash-poor settlements. Also, the planting of an apple orchard, along with cleared land and the building of a cabin, signified that land was claimed, the equivalent of a "sold" sign on a piece of wilderness.

Historian Robert Price says in his book Johnny Appleseed, Man and Myth, "It is hard to realize that in the pioneer history of most American communities, the first apple crop once marked a first stage of permanency. No other fruit could be started so easily, and none could be put to so many essential uses."

Although Indians, French settlers, and other pioneer orchardists preceded him, Chapman's unique importance lay in his own rootlessness. "He was a nurseryman with vision," says Jeff Meyer, director of AMERICAN FORESTS' Famous & Historic Trees project, who will retrace Chapman's path west this spring. "He kept moving with the frontier. Chapman was a progressive thinker; he was futuristic in his planning."

And in the apple business, being futuristic was everything. Chapman showed an uncanny ability to anticipate new settlements. Toting leather bags of apple seed from the cider mills of western Pennsylvania, he rode into new sites on horseback or transported his mobile "nursery" by canoe. After selecting an open, sunny spot and clearing the ground, he'd sow several bushels of seed (each bushel contained about 336,000 seeds). A crude brush fence protected the seedlings between his visits.

Within a few years, Chapman's trees would be ready when potential customers arrived to stake land claims. He sold the trees for a fippenny bit - about 6 1/2 cents a tree - but he was known to often extend kindhearted credit to penniless settlers. Once their apple orchard was in place, pioneer families selected trees worthwhile for fruit and grafted them onto the original seedlings. Although Chapman didn't believe in grafting, it was common practice by the early 19th century.

Why did Johnny Appleseed become a legend instead of just another orchardist? His frequent acts of kindness, feats of strength, and unusual appearance fed the pioneer imagination.

"He was a hero in our own backyards, so to speak," says Bill Jones, founder of the Johnny Appleseed Heritage Foundation and lifelong Chapman scholar. Numerous were the farm families in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania who told, and still treasure, stories of Johnny's visits. Tall tales - adding fizz to the cider of his actual life - related how he hid underwater and breathed through a reed to escape hostile Indians and walked barefoot across a frozen lake.

No one knows who planted apple seed ambition in Johnny. Scant details of his birth, family, and route west have been traced from legal documents and family genealogies. Chapman was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1774; his mother died when he was a toddler. After returning from the Revolutionary War where he'd worked as a wheelwright, John's father remarried and started a new family of 10 children.

"Little else is known about John Chapman's boyhood, although it's likely part was spent tending fruit trees on neighboring farms, giving him an early skill that was to serve him well in his life adventures," according to Joe Besecker, codirector of the Johnny Appleseed Society based at Urbana University in Ohio.

Chapman left his father's, home in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, as a teen. From 1797 to 1804 he attempted to claim land for apple plantings on French Creek between Pittsburgh and Lake Erie. Motivated by cheaper land and unsettled horizons, the 30-year-old Chapman pushed farther west into northern Ohio in the early 1800s. Land prices in that newly opened territory ranged from 50 cents to $2 an acre.

The wooded ridges and gently rolling landscape of northern Ohio beckoned, and Chapman spent most of his planting years there, purchasing several parcels of land in the Ohio territory.

It isn't difficult to imagine that Chapman saw the pristine beauty of the wilderness as evidence of heaven on earth. "Staying close to God was part of his philosophy," explains Besecker. A practical, weathered man accomplished in an adventurer's survival skills, Chapman also lived by intense religious convictions. In his Ohio days, he began to preach the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenbourg, a Swedish natural scientist and philosopher. As a devout Swedenbourgian, Chapman believed that all things existed simultaneously in the physical and spiritual worlds. Families who offered Chapman shelter were given tracts from Swedenbourg's writings.

As settlers moved further into Ohio, Chapman expanded west into northern Indiana, where he died in Fort Wayne in March 1845 at the age of 70. A trail of markers and memorial statues stretches from his hometown through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. But the terrain he knew so well has changed immeasurably. Within 40 years after his death, millions of acres of woodland were sacrificed to plow and progress. Much of his most fertile nursery land in northern Ohio can be viewed from Interstate 71.

Progress may have claimed his land but not all his trees - some grew well into the 20th century. In 1994, AMERICAN FORESTS joined the effort to save Chapman's last living legacy after Meyer was informed that a tree Johnny Appleseed planted still existed on a 140-year-old Ohio farm. The tree's age and probable connection had been authenticated by a local historical society in the 1950s, said Marilyn Algeo Wilkins, whose family owns the farm.

A venerable Abraham of a tree, it seemed too old to bear fruit. The tree was rotted on the inside, and Wilkins' father, Richard Algeo, wrapped the 11-foot trunk in chains, holding together a workhorse that had furnished his family with apples for generations.

Without an actual apple to go by, pomologists determined the tree was an Albermarle Pippin, based on its growth habit, foliage, and the variety's popularity in Chapman's day. It was later reidentified as a Rambo, Chapman's favorite variety.

"We believe it was planted in the 1830s when the farm was first established, but we'll never know exactly how old it is because the interior has decayed," says Jones, the Chapman scholar who has made frequent visits to the site.

Dave Furee, a pomologist from the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, explains the tree's longevity by pointing to the glacial terrain under the farm. "It's almost pure gravel, which allows water to percolate through and encourages the tree's roots downward. Those roots have probably grown halfway to China by now."

AMERICAN FORESTS' propagators took both cutting wood and root cuttings from the tree before its last branch broke in a tornado a few years ago. Dale Bryan of Hollydale Nursery in Tennessee was chosen to grow the Famous & Historic Johnny Appleseed tree because of his expertise with T budding, a form of grafting in which cuttings (from the original Ohio tree) are budded into envelopes of bark on common apple tree rootstocks.

"Dale grows a million apple trees each year, but he'd never seen such a vigorous tree as the Algeo's - despite its advanced age," Meyer says. As if to prove the point, the ruins of the old tree sprouted shoots, yielding several apples. With fruit in hand, experts reidentified it as a Rambo.

Ten thousand seedling trees have now been grafted and are "finishing in AMERICAN FORESTS' high-tech greenhouse in Jacksonville, Florida. Their next stop will be home gardens "across the country, where the legacy of Johnny Appleseed will flourish anew.

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