John Chapman was born on September 26, 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts, United States. He was the second child of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Chapman. During his boyhood, he had a habit of wandering away on long trips in quest of birds and flowers.
Chapman's first recorded appearance in the Middle West was in 1800 or 1801, when he was seen as he drifted down the Ohio past Steubenville, in an astonishing craft consisting of two canoes lashed together and freighted with decaying apples brought from the cider presses of western Pennsylvania. His first nursery is claimed to have been planted two miles down the river, and another up Licking Creek. It is believed that he returned frequently to Pennsylvania for more apple seeds, but by 1810 he appears to have made Ashland County, Ohio, his center of activity, living some of the time in a cabin with his half-sister, near Mansfield.
It is said that he would travel hundreds of miles to prune his orchards scattered through the wilderness. His price for an apple sapling was a “fip penny bit, ” but he would exchange it for old clothes or a promissory note which he never collected.
Wherever he went he read aloud to any who would listen from the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, or the Bible, lying on the floor and rolling forth denunciations in tones of thunder, so that he came to be accepted as a sort of Border saint, and the stories of his quixotic kindness to animals, even to insects and rattlers that bit him, are characteristic of the growth of a folk legend.
Indians regarded him as a great medicine man; he did indeed scatter the seeds of many reputed herbs of healing, such as catnip, rattlesnake weed, hoarhound, penny royal, and, unfortunately, the noxious weed dog-fennel which he believed to be anti-malarial. In 1812, when the Indians around Mansfield were incited by the British to attacks upon the American frontier settlements, Chapman volunteered to speed through the night to Mt. Vernon, Ohio, to get help from Captain Douglas, warning many lonely homesteads on the way. This incident is authenticated; there is a wider tradition that he traversed much of northern Ohio apprising settlers of the surrender of the American forces under Hull at Detroit and of the imminence of Indian massacres.
The most famous tale about him is of a Pharisaical minister who demanded from the pulpit, “Where is the man who, like the primitive Christian, walks toward heaven barefoot and clad in sackcloth?” “Johnny Appleseed, ” clad in short ragged trousers and a single upper garment of coffee sacking with holes cut for head and arms, barefoot, with a tin mush pan on his head for a hat, approached the pulpit, saying, “Here is a primitive Christian !”
About 1838 Chapman crossed gradually into northern Indiana and continued his missionary and horticultural services. But after a long trip to repair damages in a distant orchard he was overtaken by pneumonia, and presented himself at the door of William Worth’s cabin in Allen County, Indiana, where he died. A monument to him was erected by the Honorary M. B. Bushnell, at Mansfield.
John Chapman was well-known as a pioneer in nursery. He introduced apple trees to large parts of Pennsylvania, Ontario, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, as well as the northern counties of present-day West Virginia. His legendary life has inspired numerous literary works such as Denton J. Snider’s Johnny Appleseed’s Rhymes (1894), Kell Hillis’s The Quest of John Chapman (1904), Eleanor Atkinson’s Johnny Appleseed, the Romance of a Soivcr (1915), and Vachel Lindsay’s “In Praise of Johnny Appleseed” in the Century Magazine, August 1921.
Champan never married.
