Who Was Johnny Appleseed?

As the 20th century dawned, it was already unclear where the life of John Chapman ended and the legend of Johnny Appleseed began. There were still people alive in the Midwest who had encountered Chapman in his travels, but their numbers were waning.

Chapman was born in 1774 in Massachusetts. As a young man, he made his way to the Northwest Territory, an area of land that would later become Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota. Legend has it that Chapman sat on the shore in Vermilion and listened to the cannon fire during the Battle of Lake Erie. A white man granted safe passage through the wilderness by local Native Americans, Chapman became known during his lifetime as an itinerant wanderer. He would help families work farms and planted seeds for apple trees that could still be seen throughout Ohio in the years following his death.

In 1900, a memorial was dedicated to Chapman in Mansfield. His trees lived on, but the people who remembered the man himself were starting to die out. (In fact, early 20th-century accounts credited Jesuit missionaries with Chapman’s work, prompting a Bellefontaine woman, Maria Rathmell, to offer a spirited defense of the man, who planted trees on her family’s property.)

The monument, built in Mansfield’s Middle Park, was a sandstone obelisk bearing the words, “In memory of John Chapman best known as Johnny Appleseed, Pioneer, Apple Nurseryman of Richland County from 1810 to 1830.” (The monument was replaced in 1953 by one of similar design and is now located in the city’s South Park.)

“To the pioneers of Ohio, he was an unselfish benefactor, and we are here today to aid in transmitting to coming generations our grateful memory of his deeds,” said park commissioner Roeliff Brinkerhoff — also one of the founders of what is now the Ohio History Connection — in remarks delivered the day of the monument’s dedication.

But even then, grateful memories included myths, and a lot of those myths have overtaken fact in Johnny Appleseed’s story.

A wood engraving print depicting Johnny Appleseed in the collection of the Library of Congress with no date or information noted with it (photo courtesy of Library of Congress)

John Chapman was born September 26, 1774, in Leominster, Massachusetts. The Bay State was one of the 13 colonies fighting for its independence, and war was all around. Chapman’s father, Nathaniel, was a Minuteman fighting for the colonies.

The American Revolution shaped Chapman’s viewpoint as a child, leading him on the road to conservationism, says Louis Andres, chairperson of Ohio’s Johnny Appleseed Historic Byway Committee. 

“He saw how soldiers would devastate everything,” Andres says. “They’d fish all the rivers and kill all the deer.”

Growing up in Massachusetts also helped young Chapman realize the importance of apples — not necessarily as a food, but for drinking. Within a decade of the pilgrims landing in Plymouth in 1620, they had planted apple trees to make cider. It was a simple beverage to make — in its most basic form, it’s the liquid that comes from squeezing ground or cut apples in a press — and it was usually safer than drinking local water. 

Sometimes, cider was fermented to make an alcoholic beverage, hard cider, and then further distilled into applejack. (Cider was also turned into vinegar, an important ingredient in pickling, a key method of food preservation at the time.) Cider was the most popular beverage in early America and even into the late 19th century, before a temperance movement started to take hold.

Cider inspired Chapman, but not in Massachusetts. He went west, toward the great frontier, into Pennsylvania. He lived for a time in Venango County and crossed paths with John Young, a noted follower of the Swedenborgian church, an interpretation of Christianity based on the writings of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. Chapman ended up in Pittsburgh, with a home on Grant’s Hill, where he tended to a nearby orchard. 

Eventually, Chapman took seeds from a cider mill in Pittsburgh and set off into Ohio, carrying seeds by the thousands in a leather sack (cloth sacks could get caught on bushes and rip). The idea of Chapman as Johnny Appleseed is that he scattered seeds throughout the Midwest, but Andres noted that his process was more selective, planting nurseries in areas near water and paying farmers to tend to them, bartering or selling trees to settlers coming into Ohio. 

“He really was an astute businessman,” Andres says.

A mural saluting the actual, and especially folklore, figure Johnny Appleseed in downtown Mansfield, Ohio (photo by Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy of Library of Congress)

The apple variety most credited to Chapman isn’t a variety at all, but rather apples that were typically fed to livestock instead of  being eaten by humans.

“They were spitters,” says Mikaela Prescott, director and curator of the Johnny Appleseed Museum in Urbana. “If you ate them, you’d probably spit them out.”

She adds that the apples served as good sustenance for pigs, the primary meat animal of the era and region. 

“You weren’t concerned about taste,” Prescott says. “You just wanted something hardy that you knew would return every year.”

Chapman walked throughout Ohio, Indiana and Illinois barefoot and with attire described as a coffee bean sack. Rosella Rice, a woman who knew him in Ashland County, said, “He was such a good, kind, generous man that he thought it was wrong to expend money on clothes to be worn just for the fine appearance; he thought if he was comfortably clad and [dressed] in attire that suited the weather, it was sufficient.” 

Chapman himself never married, but he was warm to children, telling stories and jokes. Even during his lifetime, he’d become known as Johnny Appleseed for his devotion to the fruit. 

“I think every Indian, every settler, every trader in all that Ohio country must have known him well,” said Ohio-based, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Louis Bromfield, whose grandparents and their siblings knew the man himself. 

Andres says Chapman would spend winters in northeast Ohio, where he had friends and family, including a half-sister, Persis Chapman Broome, who lived in Perrysburg. He considered himself a missionary, carrying literature of the Swedenborg church, but was likened to a Catholic saint, Francis of Assisi, for his attunement with nature and concern for it. He became a vegetarian, and at least one story about him states that he put out a campfire one night so as not to disturb bugs. 

“He’d be eccentric by our standards, but he was a devout environmentalist,” Andres says. “He cared very deeply for life in general and the environment.”

John Chapman died March 18, 1845, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His land holdings were estimated at more than 2,000 acres at his death, “yet he denied himself almost the common necessities of life,” the Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel wrote in his death notice. “His death was quite sudden. We saw him in our streets only a day or two previous.”

Gravesite in Fort Wayne, Indiana, of John Chapman, who, as most American schoolchildren are taught, became the legendary “Johnny Appleseed” (photo courtesy of Library of Congress)

Johnny Appleseed never wore a pot on his head. It has long been accepted as fact — one more piece of evidence toward Chapman’s harmless eccentricity — but it’s just not true. 

“There was a cloth then called tin cloth,” Andres says. “It was a very sturdy fabric, and it looked like tin. Somewhere down the line, that became the idea that he wore a tin pot.”

Prescott attributes the myth to the idea that at some point, he might have put a pot on his head to entertain some children, and it became a part of the Appleseed legend, one of dozens of stories of that spread far and wide in the generations after Chapman’s death. 

Ironically, in modern times, the legend  of Johnny Appleseed needed something of an image rehabilitation. The temperance movement that supplanted cider as America’s most popular drink culminated in Prohibition from 1920 until 1933. It’s rumored that many apple orchards, including some planted by Chapman, were cut down to deter illegal cider production. This, however, is most likely a myth.

In 1948, Walt Disney released “Melody Time,” a movie made up of seven vignettes, one of which was “The Legend of Johnny Appleseed.” It got most of the basic points right, but it cemented a narrative that was already prevalent in American folklore.

“Disney took this character and made it animated and probably undertook some creative storytelling to make him an interesting character,” Andres says. “But he already was interesting.”

By the 1950s, Johnny Appleseed had become a national legend.

“There were stories in California and Texas that he planted apple trees there,” Prescott says. 

Even though he was born in Massachusetts and found a final resting place in Indiana, Chapman remains most closely associated with Ohio, the state where he lived most of his life. As The New York Times wrote in an editorial on the anniversary of his birth in 1979, “He belongs to Ohio, as Davey Crockett belongs to Tennessee and Daniel Boone belongs to Kentucky.” 

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Seeds of History 
Evidence of John Chapman’s presence can be found throughout Ohio, including at these locations that hold history related to the legend of Johnny Appleseed. 

1. Hartford, Allen County: South Defiance Trail, half a mile north of Spencerville Road: A historical marker here commemorates an apple nursery that Chapman planted “900 feet east of here” in 1829, noting he did so “on a half acre of Jacob Harter’s land leased for 40 years in exchange for 40 apple trees delivered in 1835.” 

2. Canton, Stark County: Fourth Street Southwest and Court Avenue Southwest: A marker on the side of the U.S. Post Office here notes that Chapman came to Canton in 1809, establishing an orchard where the post office’s parking lot is today. Settlers were required by law to plant 50 apple trees, and Chapman’s orchards helped them fulfill that obligation. 

3. Mount Vernon, Knox County: Phillips Street and Main Street: A marker identifies the site of Chapman’s earliest known land holdings. He arrived here and bought Mount Vernon town lot 147 (where the marker stands today) and lot 145 (located just across the road) from Joseph Walker on Sept. 14, 1809.  

4. Dexter City, Noble County: 38345 Marietta Road: Chapman’s family owned a homestead located a quarter mile south of Dexter City. Chapman visited often, although he never lived here. This small, roadside memorial is made from rocks donated by people along the route Chapman traveled during his time in the area. His last known visit was in 1842. 

5. Mansfield, Richland County: Brinkeroff Avenue and Summit Street: This marker at the entrance to Mansfield’s Central Park (there is also a marker at South Park) celebrates the city’s ties to Chapman, noting that the pioneering nurseryman “lived in and around Mansfield for 20 years” from 1810 to 1830. The Johnny Appleseed Historic Byway also highlights Chapman’s ties to this area of Ohio.

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