Who was Johnny appleseed and why apples?

"What's the story with Johnny Appleseed?
January 20, 2004

Dear Straight Dope:

What's the story behind Johnny Appleseed? Did some guy really wander around spreading apple seeds? Where did he get all the seeds? Are any of his trees still left?

— M. Crawford

I've been accused of being long winded, so here's the short answer:

The story of John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, is intimately tied to the domestication of America. In the early 1800s, he wandered what was then the frontier, planting apple seeds and helping to make the wilderness a home for the advancing pioneers. He planted over a hundred thousand square miles of apple orchards in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.

Some of the orchards are well documented and still exist. The trees in the orchards may well be descended, by seed or by grafting, from the ones he planted.

Johnny Appleseed was, to put it kindly, eccentric. He was a vegetarian and traveled barefoot, and, equally out of character with his times, showed kindness to animals and befriended the Indians. He preached a Christianity that was close to nature-worship. He was known as "Johnny Appleseed" in his lifetime, a folk hero about whom legends and stories were told, then and since. He became a mythic figure, who helped to tame the wilderness by planting apple orchards. He embodied two extremes: the rugged individualist and the gentle humanitarian.

So much for the short answer. The definitive biography was written by Robert Price (see resources at the end of this article), based on writings by people who knew him. We have lots of documentation of the bare bones of his story, such as land leases and promissory notes. But many of the memoirs were written long after the fact and so are of dubious trustworthiness.

Before we get into Johnny Appleseed's life, though, we need to learn something about apples. Much of the following comes from Michael Pollan's wonderful book, The Botany of Desire, also cited below. If you took Pomology 101, you'd learn that apples don't "grow true" from seeds. An apple tree grown from a seed bears little resemblance to its parent, and the fruit normally is almost inedible, very sour or bitter. To get edible apples, you graft trees, producing a clone of a tree that you know bears tasty fruit, rather than plant from seeds.

Apples were brought to the New World by the earliest immigrants. Trees grown from seedlings, called "pippins," prospered in New England, especially after the colonists imported honeybees to improve pollination.

Soil, climate, and sunlight hours in America were different from those in Europe, but the apple was able to adapt to the New World in a remarkably short time. Pollan says, "Every time an apple failed to germinate or thrive in American soil, every time an American winter killed a tree or a freeze in May nipped its buds, an evolutionary vote was cast, and the apples that survived this great winnowing became ever so slightly more American. A somewhat different kind of vote was then cast by the discriminating orchardist. Whenever a tree somehow distinguished itself for the hardiness of its constitution, the redness of its skin, the excellence of its flavor – it would promptly be named, grafted, publicized, and multiplied." The adaptation of the apple to America was thus the result of a "simultaneous process of natural and cultural selection."

Here's something else you probably didn't know. In the 1700s and 1800s, most apples were grown not for eating but for making hard cider. Johnny Appleseed didn't just bring fresh fruit to the frontier, he brought the alcoholic drink of choice. "

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