When somebody jumped one of his land claims, his main concern seemed to be whether they would still let him take care of his apple trees. He preferred, if possible, nothing at all. —Vachel Lindsay, In Praise of Johnny Appleseed. In a way, his name is as durable as Andrew Jackson’s, who died in the same year, but he has been remarkably neglected by the historians, probably because he conforms to none of the national stereotypes and illustrates nobody’s theories. Johnny Appleseed is a bio-fiction animated feature from Walt Disney, using the nickname of Johnny Appleseed, a real-life American frontiersman born as John Chapman. On the Whetstone River, near the Clear Fork of the Mohican, the Vandorn boys helped him build a fourteen-by-sixteen-foot cabin for wintering over, impressed at how fearlessly he slept on top of a windfall as the wolves and owls howled. Trusted Writing on History, Travel, Food and Culture Since 1949, Society for Printing, Publishing and Circulating the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. With the warm weather, they separated, Nathaniel, in his late teens, being old enough to strike off independently and to settle eventually on Duck Creek near Marietta in southern Ohio on the Ohio River, where by 1805 Nathaniel senior, the former minuteman, also moved with his family. He took an untheatrical view of the hereafter, however—a place he didn’t think would be all that different in geography or its earthly occupations from the world he lived in. The Legend of Johnny Appleseed is an animated short musical segment from Walt Disney's 1948 film Melody Time.It is narrated by Dennis Day and is based on the American frontiersman John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed.It is also included on the 2001 direct to video, VHS, and DVD release Disney's American Legends John Chapman was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in seventeen seventy-four. He didn’t die there, but at the home of the Worth family on the St. Joseph River not far off, presumably of pneumonia contracted during a fifteen-mile trudge in mid-March, leading his black ox to repair an orchard fence that cattle had trampled down. He did not, but undoubtedly he gave seeds to pioneers who ventured much farther west. Houston praised Chapman's work as a labor of love. Chapman grew trees and supplied apple seeds to settlers in the middle western Great Lakes area. What would a conventional movie-maker do with a vegetarian frontiersman who did not believe in horseback riding and wore no furs; who planted fruit trees in praise of a Protestant God, and gave much of his money away to impoverished families he met; who would “punish” one foot that had stepped on an angleworm by walking with it bare over stony ground and regretted for years killing a rattlesnake that had bitten him in the grass; who would douse his campfire when mosquitoes fell into it? 7 Facts About Johnny Appleseed. John’s mother had died meanwhile. Others called him a great medicine man. He may have been wearing his fabled mush pan on his head (if he ever did), with plenty of plantings in Pennsylvania behind him and his vision of the figure he wanted to cut for the rest of his life in front of him. with three words (okay, one word, but I’m tired of talking about the the Patriots): fall, apple-picking, and cider. Mansfield lay between the Clear and Black forks, and Mount Vernon was on the Kokosing, which wasn’t far off. As most Chapmans know, Johnny Appleseed was a nickname for one of the many John Chapmans. He spouted Biblical language, according to at least one witness, though inevitably there were some false alarms: “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.” This is the self-dramatist in him that made Casey Jones, John Henry, and Davy Crockett heroes also. Playing next. That summer and fall, with his woodcraft and marathon-endurance, John Chapman fulfilled a hero’s role, once racing thirty miles from Mansfield to Mount Vernon, Ohio, to summon reinforcements and arouse the white settlers to the peril posed by General William Hull’s surrender to British forces at Detroit. Mike Fink, a very rough guy who died twenty years earlier than Johnny on a trip to the Rockies, once set his common-law wife on fire in a pyre of leaves when she winked at another man. He is more typical of the frontiersmen we remember. Instead, he bartered for potatoes, corn meal, salt and flour, and peddled cranberries—a fruit that the pioneers combined into stews or dried with suet for a midwinter treat. His father, Nathaniel, was a carpenter and a farmer who earned modest wages with which to support his wife, Elizabeth, and his children. Another time he announced that two female spirits had shown themselves to him and told him they would be his wives in the afterlife, bidding him abstain until then. In 1822 he may have gone to Detroit to sightsee, and, around 1826, to Urbana and Cincinnati. Everywhere he traveled, he was welcomed. He believed that the soil produced everything necessary for humans. Over time, some adults said they remembered receiving presents from Johnny Appleseed when they were children. He was also a missionary for The New Church(Swedenborg… You can hardly miss him if you visit the city. He moved along coincident with or a step ahead of the first flying parties of settlers, to have apple trees of transplantable age ready for them when they got their land cleared. Others he hurried back to, hearing that a herd of cattle had broken in. Casey Jones died from driving his locomotive faster than he ought to have. We don’t really know how hard he worked, because, set against this picture of a religious zealot for whom apple trees in their flowering were a living sermon from God, is the carefree master of woodcraft who supposedly strung his hammock between treetops and lazed away the pleasant days. A Treasury of American Folklore , Johnny Appleseed, along with Abe Lincoln and George Washington, occupies a tiny section entitled “Patron Saints.” (John Henry and Paul Bunyan are “Miracle Men.”) But, legendary walker that he was, he is fabled as much for abusing his feet as for sporting tin pots on his head or cardboard headgear. We do know he corresponded with a distinguished co-religionist in Philadelphia, William Schlatter, who was also his supplier of evangelical tracts, though unfortunately none of Chapman’s letters have survived. Straight land sales on settled portions of the Ohio River at this time involved terms of two dollars an acre, with fifty cents down. “This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries.…”. Another time, he was trapped in the wilderness during a severe snowstorm. Along came 10 ha… Support with a donation>>. Johnny Appleseed's Apples Weren't for Eating. Then, he planted his seeds in a straight line and built a fence around them. Johnny Appleseed… In Ohio the Indians he knew were Delawares, Mohicans, and Wyandots, who were soon driven out of the state in the aftermath of the attacks they mounted (or allegedly hoped to mount) with British encouragement during the War of 1812. Johnny Appleseed was the name given to John Chapman. He may have seen Illinois and the Mississippi River and crossed into Iowa. He sold, traded and planted in other areas. The son of Nathaniel and Elizabeth (Simons) Chapman, he was born September 26 1774 in Leominster, Worcester County, Massachusetts. Often he shucked corn, split rails, and girdled trees for his keep. In a short time, the seeds grew to become trees that produced fruit. What did Johnny Appleseed do? Death & Legacy. This page is part of Stories About People which is part of Interesting Things for ESL Students. Such fortitude won the Indians’ respect, and he planted some trees in the Indian villages as well as in white towns. He died, unmarried, in Fort Wayne, Allen County, Indiana March 18 1845. Only three families lived in what has become Licking County, but Ohio was only two years short of statehood by then. I'm Faith Lapidus. To license content, please contact licenses [at] americanheritage.com. 1 Appearances 1.1 Melody Time 1.2 Walt Disney anthology series 1.3 House of Mouse 1.4 Cinderella II: Dreams Come True 2 … Born and raised in Leominster, the man remembered as "Johnny Appleseed" left Massachusetts in the 1790s just as farmers were moving into the Midwest. It is estimated that, during his lifetime, he planted enough trees to cover an area of about two hundred sixty thousand square kilometers. There have been various speculations regarding Johnny Appleseed’s death. The man who shaped the nursery field that we know of today and also helped conserve plantation, Johnny Appleseed, was born on September 26, 1774. He speculated in a couple of town lots in Mount Vernon, one of which he sold after nineteen years for a profit of five dollars. If you tried to eat one of John Chapman's apples, it … When not in a coffee sack, he dressed in a collarless tow-linen smock or straight-sleeved coat that hung down to his heels, over a shirt and burr-studded pants that had been traded to him for his apple seeds. His eyes were black and bright. Preschool. That was fifty years after they had sauntered out from Longmeadow together, and John, famous and cranky and old, with a “thick bark of queerness on him,” as Robert Price expresses it, and only three years short of his death, trudged east from Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he was living with Persis and her family, to Marietta, for a final reunion. But Mr. Price reminds us that Chapman lived out his three score and ten years, and that the error of folklore is to simplify. In the gaudy parade of liars, killers, pranksters, boasters and boosters that fill up B. John and his older sister moved to Longmeadow with their father and his new wife. Johnny Appleseed died After a life of travel, religious devotion and conservation, Appleseed died in Fort Wayne, Indiana. When he sold apple seedlings, he liked to be paid with an IOU, scarcely having any use for money except to give it away to needy families, and left to God and the debtor’s own conscience the question of whether he was finally paid. He had long dark hair. Though he must have brewed gentler poultices for other poeple’s wounds, his method of healing his own was to sear the offending location with a hot piece of iron—as the Indians did—and then treat the burn. Visit Fort Wayne for the 39th Annual Johnny Appleseed Festival September 21-22, 2013 to learn more and pay homage to this legendary Hoosier. They paused in the Wilkes-Barre region for a year or two, then may have ventured south to the Potomac in eastern Virginia and dawdled along from there toward Port Cumberland, then, via Braddock’s Road, to the Monongahela, and on by 1797 to Pittsburgh, during what was now John Adams’ presidency. Some of the seeds were planted on land owned by a farmer named Isaac Stedden. I'm Faith Lapidus. Apples were an important food for the early settlers of North America. —From A Book of Americans by Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét. JOHNNY APPLESEED. Once, in Seneca territory, he was being chased by a war party, before he had made his name favorably known to them, and as the story goes, he slipped into a swampy reedbed and lay with just his mouth above water, napping until the warriors gave up hunting him. Saint Francis also is remembered for his love of animals and for honoring nature. Saint Francis established a Roman Catholic group that cares for the poor and the sick. “I, John Chapman (by occupation a gatherer and planter of apple seeds),” begins a deed from the Fort Wayne days. His mother Elizabeth became sick with tuberculosis and died a short time after the birth of her third child. Despite his small roach of a beard, unkemptly clipped, and his dark horny feet and deliberately apostolic costume, he kept himself clean, and “in his most desolate rags” was “never repulsive,” his acquaintances reported. Join us again next week for another PEOPLE IN AMERICA program on the Voice of America. That he walked Alone.… I'm Faith Lapidus. Scarcely a year after the birth of John, his second child, the father left to fight in the Revolution as one of the original Minutemen, first at Bunker Hill in 1775, then with General Washington’s army in New York the next year, wintering at Valley Forge in 1777-78. In icy weather, at best he wore castoffs given to him—sometimes one shoe and one broken boot, tied on with varicolored string wound around his ankle, sometimes only one shoe, with which he broke trail through the snow for his bare foot. He was a legend by now—a bluebird, to the bluejay figure of the raftsman Mike Fink, who had poled the Ohio River nearby at about the same time. He liked to read from the Christian holy book, the Bible. Removing his discolored Bible and Swedenborgian tracts from the pouch he created for them inside his smock by tying his belt tightly, he would ask with exuberance, “Will you have some fresh news right from Heaven?” While the men smoked or fleshed a fox skin and the women cooked or quilted, he read and extemporized, his voice now roaring scriptural denunciations of evil, now soft and soothing. He was quick-talking and restlessly energetic as a visitor, but wind-beaten, hollow-cheeked, and gaunt-looking from eating so little and walking so far. John Chapman was a very religious man. John was the second of three children. Others were sure that he planted trees as far west as California. Strangely, stories about Johnny Appleseed continued to spread to other areas, long after John Chapman died. But sometimes he wore a large cloth bag or sack as clothing. The legend of Johnny Appleseed's travels didn't become very popular until a year after he died. After the article in Harper’s by W. D. Haley twenty-six years after his death, there was a sudden revival of interest in Johnny Appleseed, with people writing their recollections or hearsay memories of him to small-town newspapers throughout the Midwest. Maybe he didn’t even long to participate in the drama of the Great West ahead. He lived very simply. He planted apple seeds in several areas near a place called Licking Creek. He had enough money for shelter and clothes if he had wanted to buy these things. While he was there. He was shy in a crowd but a regular sermonizer among people he felt at home with—probably a bit of a bore at times, but no simpleton. Yet he never hurt these creatures. He stopped to establish a planting a couple of miles below town, and probably another at the mouth of the Muskingum, at Marietta, near where his father had settled the year before. He slept in the open air and did not wear shoes on his feet. His father, Nathaniel, was a farmer, carpenter, and wheelwright descended from Edward Chapman, who had arrived in Boston from Shropshire in 1639. He was a frontier hero “of endurance that was voluntary, and of action that was creative and not sanguinary,” as that 1871 issue of. Yet he was a successful businessman. Both settlers and native Americans liked him. And I'm Steve Ember. It was an element in the myth of Johnny Appleseed that he could doze off in the most dangerous circumstances—so calm he was. He would clear a patch and plant and fence it, sometimes sleeping in his hammock, looking startlingly serene, swinging there, to travelers who were full of frightening tales of the woods. He was well known for his eccentricity and the strange garb he usually wore. He only lived in Leominster a few years, though. (Legend would later extend his travels all the way to California.) Johnny struck the creature, killing it. His life had extended from the battle of Bunker Hill to the inauguration of James K. Polk as president; and the last person who claimed to have seen Johnny Appleseed with his own eyes didn’t die until just before World War II. Ascending the Muskingum, past Zanesville, to a tributary called Walhonding, or White Woman’s Creek, where the Licking River comes in, he poled up to the Mohican River and finally to the Black Fork of the Mohican, where he already may have had a nursery growing, because central Ohio by now was not unfamiliar country to him. During his forties he traveled less, but even after he had lost most of his land and had renewed his vows of poverty-moving west again with horseloads of apple seeds to the Miami and Tiffin rivers—he came back to Perrysville to winter with family and friends. “There is in the western country a very extraordinary missionary of the New Jerusalem. (Five pennies per sapling was the price at the time.) Chapman belonged to the Church of New Jerusalem, a religious group based on Swedenborg's teachings. When word of Chapman's death reached Washington, DC, Senator Sam Houston of Texas made a speech honoring him. He used his money to improve his apple business and help other people. His favorite was the two-foot-high, bad-smelling mayweed, or “dogfennel,” another alien, which spoiled the taste of milk when cows ate it and for a while was called “Johnnyweed,” with the idea that he might have been planting it everywhere as a practical joke. He had been a local character, but there were other applemen who made a business of selling trees, mostly as a sideline to farming. However, some of the stories told about Johnny Appleseed over the years may not have been really true. Nowadays we like heroes in boots, however. This ancient apple tree lives on a farm in Nova, Ohio, where Johnny Appleseed is believed to have planted an entire orchard of Rambo apple trees in 1830, and indeed still produces fruit [source: American Forests]. Appleseed was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, and at the time of his death, Appleseed was 70 years old. That is, he had been a mystic before, and he ended his days in Indiana as a kind of landmark, with the “thick bark of queerness” still on him, thoroughly a mystic again. More important, he respected and sympathized with them at a time when many white woodsmen shot them on sight like vermin, to clear the woods, or else humiliated them by catching their horses and tying sticks in their mouths and clapboards to their tails and letting the horses run home with the clapboards on fire. In 1792, Ohio Company of Associates granted homesteaders 100 acres of land if they ventured further into Ohio’s wilderness. The Stalking Indian, He had a string of good stories of Indians and wolves for them, and presents of ribbon and whatnot that he carried with him to give to their sisters. The young buck strenuously logging, snowshoeing, existing on butternuts in the French Creek period, must have been quite a different figure from “Johnny Appleseed” practicing his kindnesses and charities during the two and a half decades he lived in Ohio and brought apples to Ashland, Bucyrus, Cohocton, Findlay, New Haven, Van Wert, and many another town on giveaway terms. He did use snuff, however, and would sip a dram of hard liquor to warm up in cold weather—if one can generalize fairly about his conduct from isolated instances of testimony about five decades of such intense and fervent activity. See Johnny Appleseed Today in History - September 26 at The Library of Congress posted September 26, 2017 on Facebook. It’s thought that John Chapman, around 1792, at the age of eighteen, set out with his half-brother Nathaniel, who was seven years younger, for this frontier. He has actually thawed the ice with his bare feet. Reports from that period suggest that some native Americans believed he was "touched by God." And as an entrepreneur with considerable foresight about the eventual patterns of settlement, he allowed himself to be utterly clipped and gypped in matters of real estate through much of his life. Sometimes, he gave away trees to needy settlers. Free subscription >>, Please consider a donation to help us keep this American treasure alive. In the gaudy parade of liars, killers, pranksters, boasters and boosters that fill up B. His birthplace has a granite marker and a billboard, streets and schools bear his name and a wooden statue of him stands in City Hall. Or dried for eating during the winter Francis of Assisi Vincent Benét Swedish and. 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