Author’s Note: Research is credited to National Day Calendar, Wikipedia, and Cedar Valley Arboretum and Botanic Gardens.
Johnny Appleseed, a larger-than-life myth that some of us may recall learning about way back in elementary school. As it is, the man is not, in fact, a myth but a very real person with his own national holiday. Every year on March 11, the National Day Calendar marks off National Johnny Appleseed Day in his honor.
Born John Chapman on September 26, 1774, in Leominster, Massachusetts, Johnny’s early life history is not well known. His mother, Elizabeth Simons Chapman, died when Johnny was only two years old. His father was a military man and served at the Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolution.
The origins of Johnny’s love of orchards are unclear, but he was apprenticed at an apple orchard where he learned to grow and care for the trees. In 1800, Johnny began his first orchard in Licking County, Ohio, on the farm of a man named Isaac Stadden. By 1806, he was setting out by canoe through the local rivers to transport his seeds.
Johnny took to traveling across New England and into the growing frontier of the United States, helping settlers start their own apple nurseries and planting their own trees.
As it is, the only native apple in North America is the crabapple, which is hardly as variable in use as other varieties. Other varieties were brought over when Europeans immigrated which means that Johnny was likely planting the more useful varieties across the continent to be used by all people. He owned several of his own orchards across the United States which were left to his older sister upon his death.
Our visions of Johnny Appleseed may have him tramping around the frontier barefoot with only a bag of seeds and not much to his name, but he was a real entrepreneur for the early 1800s. Many land contracts required the pioneers to grow orchards on their new homesteads which made the apple seedling market a hot commodity. Johnny’s life goal wasn’t so random–he filled a real need for the settlers. He often built fences around his nurseries and left them in the care of those who lived nearby.
Johnny was said to be one of the first vegetarians, as well, intent on preserving the lives of any and all living things. Legend has it that he was distasteful of campfires as they burned the mosquitoes that flew too close. He is also said to have kept a pet wolf with him after nursing its injured leg back to health.
Not only did John Chapman spread seeds, but he spread his faith wherever he went. Johnny was a member of the New Church of Jerusalem and would share his ministry with anyone he encountered making him a missionary as well as an entrepreneur and environmentalist.
John Chapman was still spry into his sixties, living to be a very old man by the standards of that time period. He owned thousands of acres of orchards across the United States and had traveled the length and breadth of the known area of the continent, mostly barefoot, walking or taking horseback and canoes on the many rivers he encountered. He died on March 18, 1845, near Fort Wayne, Indiana. (The dates of his death range throughout March 1845 or March 1847, but this is the date that is typically most agreed upon by historians.)
John Chapman, aka “Johnny Appleseed,” lived a legacy that is a part of American folklore even today. His love of both people and nature left an impression on many and his own national holiday on March 11 is a reminder of his life’s mission.