by Eric Rutkow
Outfitted in such an unusual manner, Chapman seemed to have emerged from nature itself, but in truth his roots traced back to New England. He was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, on September 26, 1774, the second child of a farmer who was one of the original Minutemen. Chapman’s father apparently fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill and later served with Washington’s Continental Army. In 1776, while Chapman’s father was still away fighting, his mother died, and he and his older sister were effectively orphaned, raised in the care of a neighboring family.
Between this point and Chapman’s 1797 appearance in Warren, painfully few details survive, leaving only questions about where he attained his interest in the undeveloped frontier or his love for apples.
With regard to the first issue, territorial developments in the new nation offered some insight. On July 13, 1787, when Chapman was twelve years old, the United States incorporated an enormous stretch of land north and west of the Ohio River known as the Northwest Territory. Its more than 260,000 square miles included the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin as well as the northeastern section of Minnesota. Most of this was federal land, and government policy in the period favored transferring such property to private hands as quickly as possible. Some lands were given to war veterans and some allotments were purchased by private investors, but for most of the first decade Native American threats inhibited settlement. This changed in 1795, when a peace treaty was signed in the wake of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s victory over the affiliated tribes of the Western Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
Developers soon began promoting cheap lands—in the regions around Pittsburgh and countless other areas throughout the West—to the growing and often debt-ridden populations of Massachusetts and the Connecticut Valley. Soon enterprising Americans, willing to hack out a new life from the great hardwood forests of the interior, started pushing into the frontier, first along the Susquehanna Valley of western Pennsylvania and eventually into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. When Chapman appeared at Warren in 1797, he was arriving with this first wave of settlers.
But why, even if he was following this westward push, did he show up hauling a store of apple seeds?
APPLES, THE QUINTESSENTIAL American fruit, are thought to have originated primarily in the forested foothills of the Tien Shan Mountains, along the border between northwest China, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Apple seeds are a bit like snowflakes in that no two are exactly alike. Any given apple tree can produce offspring whose fruits differ markedly from those of their parents: seeds from a sweet apple can yield bitter apples, large apples can yield small, and so on through an infinite list of possibilities. This quality has made them among the most adaptable and durable fruits in the entire plant kingdom, but it also meant that no desirable fruits lasted longer than the life span of a specific tree. Eventually prehistoric farmers learned that apples, like many trees, could reproduce through grafting or budding, processes where preexisting plant matter was attached to a new rootstock. This allowed a degree of control over variation.
By the time the first colonists reached North America, the fruit already had a long and rich history throughout the known world. An apple from the Tree of Knowledge had tempted Eve in the mainstream translations of the Old Testament. A golden apple of discord had sparked a contest between Greek gods that led to the Trojan War. A falling apple had helped Isaac Newton recognize the force of gravity.
The cultivated apple—as opposed to native crab apples that some Native Americans may have used—emigrated to North America as seeds that the earliest colonists carried. The man thought to have introduced them to New England was an eccentric Plymouth minister named William Blackstone (or Blaxton), who arrived in 1623. Tradition suggests that he saddle-trained a bull and rode it through the countryside distributing apples and flowers. Peter Stuyvesant, the last administrator of New Netherland (present-day New York City), likely imported the first apple graft—in the mid-seventeenth century his orchard in the Bowery district featured the Summer Bonchretien apple, a Dutch variety.
Apples soon thrived in the colonies thanks, in large part, to their method of propagation. Whereas many European plant species suffered in the New World (and prompted continental natural historians to posit the theory of “cultural degeneracy” that Jefferson rebuffed), European apple trees successfully adapted to their new environs (and also cross-bred with native crab apples). Farmers planted seeds on newly cleared land, hoping for a few palatable specimens, which they could then graft if desired. The first named American variety was, quite possibly, Blaxton’s Yellow Sweeting (known today as the Sweet Rhode Island Greening), which the bull-riding minister grew as far back as 1635. Another contender for this crown is the Roxbury Russet, named for the Massachusetts town of its origin and the russet, or brownish, color of its skin.
By the mid-eighteenth century, apple cultivation had progressed to the point where England was importing New World varieties. A letter that Collinson sent Bartram in 1759 noted that “Our friend Benjamin [Franklin had] a fine parcel of . . . apples [brought] over, this year,—in which I shared.” The variety that Franklin had carried over was the most popular apple in the colonies, the Newtown Pippin, pips being apple trees grown originally from seed. This fruit must have made a strong impression on Collinson, for he freely expressed his displeasure in Bartram’s failure to include any specimens in his latest shipment: “We were sadly disappointed,—being in hopes of seeing some grafts of the true Newtown Pippin; but there was none.” Later, Jefferson wrote from France to James Madison, “They have no apple here to compare to our Newtown Pippin.”
Palate-pleasing varieties like the Newtown Pippin, however, played only a small part in the fruit’s American history. Most planted trees came from seeds, not grafts, and the large majority, well over 99 percent, produced fruit far inferior to a Yellow Sweeting or a Roxbury Russet. These infinite barrels never made it to the dining table. Many became food for the hogs that most American farmers raised. Others were dried until needed for sauces, or converted into vinegar, or cooked down into preserves. But the most popular use was in fermentation. Far and away, the factor that allowed the apple to dominate the landscape and affect the economy was its role in the first great American drink: hard cider.
Colonists prized alcoholic beverages. Strong drafts were often safer than drinking water, which could be unpalatable and polluted, and they palliated a harsh life spent fighting the forests and taming the land. Seventeenth-century New England already had a well-developed cider culture, and, with apples quickly acclimating to the American landscape, the beverage was a natural fit. Many other, less successful alternatives were concocted in the early years of colonization, including beers made from spruce, pumpkin, and persimmon, and so-called health beers produced from just about anything else available. Another rival, rum, was imported from the sugar-producing islands—part of the many triangle trades that New England ships participated in—but nothing competed with cider in scope and availability. It was one of the few aspects of American culture that all the colonies shared.
The drink peaked in popularity during the century that framed the American Revolution. The average New England family was consuming seven barrels annually by 1767, roughly thirty-five gallons per person. One in ten New England farms owned and operated a cider mill. On July 4, 1788, when seventeen thousand Philadelphians assembled to celebrate the establishment of the Constitution, they drank nothing but beer and cider, prompting the newspaper report to comment, “Learn, reader, to prize those invaluable Federal liquors [i.e., cider and beer], and to consider them as the companions of those virtues that can alone render our country free and respectable.” John Adams, the nation’s second president, reportedly began each morning with a tankard of hard cider. Frenchman St. John de Crèvecoeur, who traveled throughout the new nation and wrote a series of widely read essays and letters, once stated bluntly, “Cider is to be found in every house.” The drink even became a common unit for
exchange, much as white pine boards were in New Hampshire and Maine.
Thus, the American apple orchard was really a cider orchard, and it was an ever-present feature of farms for all classes of citizens. Jefferson’s Monticello orchards contained about 265 cider apple trees, mostly of the Taliaferro and Hewes Crab varieties. Washington’s Mount Vernon orchards produced a staggering 120 gallons of cider or mobby (apple or peach brandy) each day throughout the autumn. Crèvecoeur once noted that on his own farm he had prepared “a new apple orchard of five acres consisting of three hundred and fifty-eight trees.”
Planting a cider orchard was not only something that every farmer chose to do; in many circumstances, it was something that every farmer had to do, often before they even constructed their dwellings. Possession of an orchard indicated that land was being settled and productively used. When Washington offered portions of his own land for lease, he mandated:
[W]ithin three years there shall be planted an orchard of 100 apple trees . . . and 100 peach trees, the same to be kept always during the continuance of said lease well pruned, fenced in and secured from horses, cattle and other creatures that might hurt them.
The Ohio Company, one of the land development firms operating in the Northwest Territory, required settlers seeking one-hundred-acre lots to plant not less than fifty apple trees and twenty peach trees within three years. The planting of apple seeds or peach stones often served as a guarantee to warrant land titles. Apple trees (along with peach trees) were the only trees that settlers and typical farmers actually planted on their property. Everything else met the ax, ornamental plantings being the province of wealthy men like Washington and Jefferson. The first apple crop meant settlement had been achieved, both culturally and often legally.
The problem for settlers in the interior was how to acquire these all-important trees, the providers of food, drink, and, most important, title to land. Carrying seedlings or grafting scions from their homes back East was impractical and a waste of precious space. Besides, few could have afforded to buy the stock in the first place. Starting a tree from seed was troublesome in its own right. The maturation process took five years, a dangerously long stretch of time for men looking to cultivate the land and claim title as fast as possible in a notoriously corrupt system.
AGAINST THIS BACKDROP appeared John Chapman and his satchel of apple seeds at Warren, Pennsylvania, in late 1797. He was not the first to bring apples into the Old Northwest, nor was he the only nurseryman to set up shop, but what made Chapman unique, aside from his comportment, was a lifetime spent pursuing the frontier, anticipating the waves of settlers, always ready with young seedlings and a concern for his fellow man’s well-being. Though apple nurseries were a business, he treated it more like a mission, happy to give his seedlings to needy families, insisting that the only true way to raise an apple was from seed, and arguing that budding and grafting were perversions of nature.
By 1804, Chapman, now thirty years old, began shifting his operations from western Pennsylvania to the north central Ohio frontier, the region where he would spend much of his life. One year earlier, the federal government had opened U.S. military lands to the general public, paving the way for a new rush of pioneers. Chapman’s nurseries soon spread out along the lanes of a great triangle of early Ohio trails and watercourses: The nadir was the town of Marietta, which sat at the intersection of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers and, in 1788, was the first permanent settlement established within the Northwest Territory.
Chapman traveled along these footpaths and byways, stopping to plant nurseries wherever the forest, population density, and legal circumstances permitted. According to the earliest American written description of Chapman, after taking time to sow a sufficient number of seeds, “he would go off some twenty miles or so, select another favorable spot, and again go through the same operation.” Every so often he swung east to inspect his older nurseries and collect apple seeds from the cider mills of Pennsylvania, then return, as one story claimed, in two canoes lashed together, with him lying supine in one, a cache of seeds in the other.
The challenges of frontier life seemed to present no difficulties for Chapman. He often slept outside beneath the leaves of the giant hardwoods that blanketed the region. Even when neighbors offered him quarters he preferred to sleep on the floor near the fire. His need for companionship was modest. He never married and, while some rumors surfaced of a fondness for young girls, they appeared to be grounded in Rabelaisian gossip rather than actual fact. His endurance was remarkable, an almost superhuman disposition toward sweat and toil. One of the most famous tales, embellished but grounded in truth, had Chapman running through the forests for dozens of miles one night during the War of 1812 to spread the news of oncoming British and Native American attacks. An 1871 biography from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine commented, “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 the approaching peril.” The Native Americans, despite their hostility toward settlers, were said to respect Chapman as a holy man, and he walked freely among them. The Ohioan pioneers soon took to calling this strange figure John Appleseed, which later became Johnny Appleseed.
There was, however, another side to Chapman. The bowdlerized versions of his legend styled him an inscrutable lover of nature with a passion for apple seeds. A fuller picture included his devotion to Swedenborgianism, a small Christian sect based on the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish theologian. Chapman, as an adherent, believed that a spiritual continuity linked his world to the one beyond; they shared a physical geography and natural phenomena, such that everything present in the real world was also found in the afterlife. Perhaps this worldview helps explain his ascetic behavior and his devotion to spreading the seeds of America’s great utilitarian fruit.
Chapman’s religious beliefs were as well known among settlers as his nurseries. Though he carried few possessions, he always kept religious literature handy for distribution. In one of the earliest eyewitness accounts of Chapman’s life, an Ohio settler wrote:
After talking about his nurseries and relating some of his wild wood scenes, encounters with rattlesnakes, bears and wolves, he changed the conversation and introduced the subject of Swedenborg; at the same time he began to fumble in his bosom and brought forth some three or four old half-worn-out books. As we were fond of reading, we soon grabbed them, which pleased Johnny. I could see his eyes twinkle with delight. He was much rejoiced to see us eager to read them.
The first published account of Chapman, from 1817, came from a Swedenborg society in England. It described him as “a very extraordinary missionary of the New Jerusalem” and claimed that the profits from his nurseries were “intended for the purpose of enabling him to print all the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and distribute them through the western settlements of the United States.” To the extent that Swedenborgianism took root in Ohio, Chapman deserved the credit.
But few settlers actually warmed to his dogma. Some even thought he was crazy or possessed by the devil, though perhaps this was understandable given his singular lifestyle. Swedenborgianism was simply too intellectually rigorous for a largely illiterate population. Nonetheless, many of these pioneers, living on the rough edges of society with little respite from the ravages of nature and one another, were easily swayed by emotional revivalism and sensationalism, and the Old Northwest hosted one of the greatest flowerings of heterodox Protestantism in the history of the nation. There was an exhausting list, far too long to recount, that included Adventists, Congregationalists, Free-Will Baptists, Jerkers, Millerites, Mennonites, Mormons, Restorationists, Sabbatarians, Unitarians, and Universalists.
Over the course of a generation, these numerous pioneers filled up Chapman’s beloved Ohio forests. Along the rivers and footpaths, once-untamed woodlands fell before the settler’s ax, and townships sprang up to fill the spaces that had earlier betrayed few signs of Western civilization beyond Chapman’s
nurseries.
Again, he turned westward. The nation’s inhabitable boundaries, which tended to grow in parallel with the retreat of Native Americans, had expanded in 1817 following the Treaty of Maumee Rapids, when confederated tribes relinquished a further four million acres in the Northwest. This new terrain of forests, swampland, and transitional prairie included the spot where, more than twenty years earlier, the Battle of Fallen Timbers had been won. Within this latest frontier Chapman spent the last third of his life, spreading his nurseries along a roughly east-west corridor that stretched from Mansfield, Ohio, located north of the Muskingum River, out toward Defiance, Ohio, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, beyond.
In 1845, after almost fifty years of following the Northwest frontier, Chapman’s life came to an end near Fort Wayne. Though he had lived as a pauper, he did not die as one. His land holdings totaled several hundred acres spread across more than twenty properties in the Old Northwest. This was not a great fortune, but it exceeded that of most early settlers. Chapman’s true legacy, of course, were the millions of apple seeds he had sown throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. For this he was enshrined in the pantheon of early American heroes, though most of the context was lost in the twentieth century, when he became, among other things, a Disney character.
Apples, meanwhile, suffered something of a similar blanching. Consumption of hard cider declined dramatically in the mid-nineteenth century as new immigrant populations from Germany and elsewhere brought a strong culture of beer that infringed on cider’s dominance, and as the early stirrings of the temperance movement, along with continuing western immigration, made many farmers abandon or destroy their cider orchards.
Whereas early Americans equated apples with cider, their twentieth-century counterparts regarded them as a healthful snack. L. H. Bailey, one of the nation’s leading horticulturists in the early twentieth century, once quipped, “The gradual change in customs, whereby the eating of the apple (rather than the drinking of it) has come to be paramount, is a significant development.”