Well, I snapped a couple of pictures.

I started walking back downtown Long Meadow, and then a police car came up and pulled off the road right across the tree line, across the sidewalk and jumped out, and you said, what will you do with taking pictures of people's houses?

And I tried to explain to the police officer that, well, I'm a historian and I'm researching the life of John Chapman, the real Johnny apple Seed.

And the police officer said to me, you're trying to tell me that Johnny apple Seed is real.

You think I'm that stupid.

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Okay, let's get to the show today.

Our guest is William Kerrigan, author of the book Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard, a Cultural History.

Hey Bill, how are you.

Today, Bob?

I'm doing great.

I'm thrilled to be talking to you, and I'm thrilled to be talking about Johnny Appleseed.

Well, Bill, we brought you on the show today because we have a question from Mark and Wilmington, Delaware, who wants to know was Johnny Appleseed a real person?

If so, what did he actually do?

So Bill, to set this up, let's get right to the heart of the question.

Was Johnny Appleseed a real person?

Okay?

Yes, In fact, Johnny Appleseed was a real person.

And I have a little personal story about the stakes involved in and John Chapman.

Was he being a real person?

When I was doing the research for this book, many many, many years ago, I traced John Chapman's path from Ohio backwards to Massachusetts and I stopped in the town of Long Meadow where he was a child.

And I got to town before the town library opened, so I went for a walk.

I was looking for a house that some locals believed he lived in, and it was pretty early in the morning.

It's beautiful historic town.

And I found the house and I had a big, clunky digital camera with me.

This is before everyone had a camera on their phone, so I thought, well, I want to take a picture of this house.

I don't want to disturb the residence this early in the morning, so I'll just snap a picture and walk back to town.

I snapped a couple of pictures, I started walking back downtown Long Meadow, and then a police car came up and pulled off the road right across the tree line, across the sidewalk and jumped out and he said, what were you doing taking pictures of people's houses.

I felt terrible, of course, because I'd clearly scared somebody, and I tried to explain to the police officer that, well, I'm a historian and i'm researching the life of John Chapman, the real Johnny Appleseeed, and I have some evidence to suggest he lived in that house.

And I really feel bad that I didn't just knock on the door and ask for permission, but I didn't want to disturb them.

And the police officer said to me, you're trying to tell me that Johnny Appleseed is real.

You think I'm that stupid.

So at that moment, I thought, does my freedom depends on convincing him he's real?

But instead I just assured him that I was very sorry, that I was willing to go talk to the residents, and that if they had any questions, I would be in the town library all day.

My car was parked out there and old red tempo with a bike and a kayak attached to the top.

And he let me go.

But yeah, so, even in a town where Johnny Appleseed spent part of his childhood, not everyone knew he was real.

Well, yeah, Bill, like, it's well, it's because we grow up with this idea he's he's this name, and there is this mythic quality to him.

You know, he is tied in there with Paul Bunyan and and and and then and Davy Crockett, who hated to be called being called Davy by the way.

Uh, David Crockett and and uh and Daniel Boone.

You know, these are the you know, some real some fiction fiction attached to the real people in many cases.

So paint us a picture of John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, What did he look like?

You know?

What was tell us about him.

Okay, so he was.

He was about five foot nine, was pretty skinny and older.

In his older years, he had fairly long hair.

The one sketch that survives of him uh drawn by by an artist who was talking to a woman who'd known him as a child.

To me, he looks exactly like Jimmy Dale Gilmore.

You know Jimmy Dell Gilmore.

Yes, okay, the Great for those who don't know, the Great Texas Troubadour, A great we would call it American americanum music.

Yeah.

Yeah, So that's the one image we have a sketch.

And when I first saw that, I almost fell out of my chair because I could have sworn I was looking at the picture of Jimmy del Gilmore.

But he was real.

His real name was John Chapman.

One of the reasons that I think that people doubt he's real is he's so his life is so heavily layered in tall tales and so gilded, and lots of those are obviously not true stories, and even the ones that have a grain of truth are often greatly exaggerated.

And the historical records we have of him that prove his existence, it's a pretty small group of records, so we have church records indicating when he was born and when was that bill he was born.

He was born in seventeen seventy four September twenty seconds twenty six, seventeen seventy four in Leminster, Massachusetts.

His father was when a few months later would be heading off to Lexicon in Concord as a minuteman.

He would his father would would not be around for most of the first six years of his life.

His mother, during the war, while his father was away, became pregnant.

When she had tuberculosis, She and the baby both died as a result, and John was raised by relatives in Lemonster for about the first six years of his life.

In seventeen eighty, his father, Nathaniel Chapman, and bought six years in the Revolution, which which puts him in a subset of revolution areas that wanted story and calls the hardcore.

Most people who fought for the revolution, they fought for a year or two and then they went back and took care of their businesses and farm farms.

Nathanga Chapman fought for six years and he finally when he finally got out, he was stationed at the Springfield Armory, and he had John and possibly his older sister Elizabeth join him in Long Meadow, which little tiny town south of Springfield, where he had remarried to a woman named Lucy Cooley, and they lived in a small house and they quickly started having more children, and Lucy would eventually have ten children.

And this is a very small house.

So John, who was the oldest step son in this increasingly crowded house, he probably left home pretty early.

In fact, seventeen ninety census suggests he's no longer in the town.

He's out of that.

He's out of the house by fourteen or fifteen.

My guess is he was apprenticed locally.

His father had been apprenticed as a carpenter when he was fourteen, and it probably followed that that path he then We don't know much about him in his teen years, but then he appears starts to appear in records in northwest Pennsylvania about seventeen ninety six, and he will set He'll spend six or eight years in northwestern Pennsylvania.

He is at the first place that he has recorded as having planted apple seeds, but he also was involved in farming.

He was tapping maple trees.

He was selling his labor driving cattle for locals.

He was trying to start a homestead.

But this northwestern Pennsylvania frontier at this time was a really hard place to get a land plan.

There were two different ways you could acquire land.

You could go into a Philadelphia land company office and put money down on land you've never seen.

Or you could go try to claim land by improvement, get on the land, clear it, plant an orchard, build a fence, plant some crops, and then eventually go back.

So all of the land titles there were a mess.

There were people who had tried to acquire the land both ways, and he he was eventually pushed out of northwestern Pennsylvania, I think because someone jumped his land claim and he then kind of headed towards Ohio.

So, Bill, if a man interrupted, you said earlier that northwestern Pennsylvania this is where he starts to plant apple seeds.

Yes, so what why?

Like right, this is the big, the big mystery of this legend, Like what attracted him to the apple and ed him to plant these seeds?

Right?

So yeah, his years at Northwestern Pennsylvania are the most interesting to me because the people who knew him there.

He didn't have the nickname Johnny apple Seed yet that he picked that up later in Ohio.

But why plant apple seeds?

Well, one of the ways on the frontier that you could make a land improvement claim.

It varied from state to state, but one of the ways was you cleared a certain number of acres of land, you built a cabin, and you planted, in the case of parts of Ohio, fifty apple or peach trees.

And so people needed to get those orchards started soon.

And an orchard.

It wasn't just for land claims for a frontier family, for a poor frontier family, an orchard was a way to help sustain you fairly quickly, especially if you moved to a place where somebody liked.

John Chapman had arrived a few years earlier and laid out, planted from seed a lot of trees, and you're buying two to three year old seedling trees, so you're buying two to three year head started an orchard.

So that was his plan.

What he appeared to do was when he was in the East, he would go to cider mills and he would go out behind the cider mill where after the apples had been cressed, they threw all the pummice that just a ground up, mashed up fibrous stuff with the seeds in it, and they the cider mill owner would give them the seeds for free, and he'd fill them full of bags, then carry them west and plant them in little scruffy nurseries, usually along a creep try to put a kind of primitive brush fence around them to hopefully keep deer from browsing them.

And then as settlers came in a few years later, he would say, hey, I've got these nursery seedling trees, to the three year old trees.

I'll sell them to you for one cent or two cents of peace.

And he would give them the directions, and these people would just go to the nursery and pick the healthiest looking seedlings and transplant them into the orchards on their own property.

This apple tree had a lot of uses for Frontier family.

If you plant, do you have a favorite apple?

Bub You know, that's a really great question, Bill.

I appreciate you asking me that.

I used to like the red delicious yep, but I've gotten away from the waxier apple and I'm fine myself enjoying recently the honey crisp and the cosmic.

Yes, yes, I'm with you of that.

There's a lot of today.

There's a lot of amazing new varieties out.

But the way an apple is propagated is not from seed.

A variety is propagated, So the Red Delicious was a seedling apple accident.

When you plant apple seeds in the ground and you wait for those trees to grow, most of them are going to end up producing small, gnarl ditterer apples.

Even if you take your cosmic crisp seed, it's not going to grow a tree with cosmoscrape apples.

You have to have to graft to propagate those trees.

So Chapman, by planting seedling trees, was planting what Henry David Barrow called wild apples.

And if you were to plant a hundred of these these trees, most of them would have apples you would not want to sink your teeth into, but they still had a lot of use for you.

But by luck of the genetic lottery, one of those hundred trees in your orchard might have a really tasty apple that you could eat fresh and making divies and a standard apple tree could live one hundred and fifty years and within ten years can produce more apples every year than a family could use on their own.

The rest of the trees, you could press them into cider, and you could also convert them to pork.

He would let your hogs into the orchard in the fall as the apples dropped, and let them fatten themselves on those apples and then get higher values for them.

So I planna ask you this Bill.

It sounds like initially his fascination with apples or his it was entrepreneurial.

Yes, right, he was trying to make money.

At some point it changes.

Well, yeah, did it change at a certain point or was it always a little bit of both.

There's a little controversy.

So in a lot of the early legends, they just talked about him giving away apples, and he was just a he was just a Saint Francis of a CC character, just helping everybody, and there was a real part of that.

But then a professor at a little college in Ohio named Robert Price in the nineteen fifties, he started digging up more documents and he found not only did he sell apples, but he actual she bought land, and he had kind of a mask a fair amount of real estate, and this alternative theory emerged that he was he was this entrepreneurial businessman, and during the Cold War, conservatives started to really push that idea that he wouldn't have given those away.

He was a good businessman, he would have always sold them, and there was a spin on him as being almost a real estate tycoon.

I sometimes give a talk that's called the Johnny Apples Saint Francis or Steve Jobs, right, And the truth is he's a little bit of both.

I mean, he's a businessman in the sense that he has this inspired idea.

He knows there's going to be a market for these trees, and he knows he anticipates where they're going to be needed a few years in advance.

They starts planting them all over the place, right, But he knows his audience.

But the reality was he didn't really care much about money.

He spent a lot of the money buying religious tracks.

He was a follower of the Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg turned to the New Jerusalem.

He also was very He would accept IOUs from people.

He'd tell them, oh, here's where my nursery is.

Your two cents apiece, pay me whenever, And a lot of times he never collected.

If he saw a family that was in dire straits, he wouldn't even ask him for money.

So people said he often had a lot of money, but he was quick to give it away, and he didn't spend it on himself.

He continued his whole life to dress in rags and recycled clothing, to sleep outdoors most of the time.

Even when he accepted indoor accommodation, he preferred to sleep on the floor.

So, yes, he did have a smart business idea, but he was absolutely not interested in excubulating wealth, and he gave way much of the money he made, or spent it proselytizing, or just gave it to poor people who needed.

It more so this time period.

If I'm not hot, dirrect me if I'm wrong.

Are we talking about the second grade Awakening?

Yes?

Yes, And so this is a very central part of understanding who Johnny Applesid was.

So chatman back in Long Meadow when he grew up that town, Long Meadow in the years after the Revolution, wasn't all that different than one of the original Puritan towns.

It had one church, one which was also the political meetinghouse.

The same minister had been in the public for sixty years.

Everybody was delivered this one version of what faith was and what truth was.

And then John Chapman walks west, he walks into Pennsylvania and Ohio, and he encounters this second Great Awakening world, this world of people professing twenty thirty forty different faiths, and you could go to camp revivals where it was it was kind of a spiritual cafeteria, a.

Thinking bill of Charles Finney.

Yes, Yes, and all of those revivals.

You know, some of the preachers were very emotional, and they brought people to conversion through these these very emotional please.

A lot of the religions in the second Grade Awakening were what I would call heart religions that focused more on touching the listener's heart.

But there were some that were head religions, and Swedenborgianism or New Church was much more of a head religion.

It was a religion that required you to read some pretty dense theological works and spend a lot of time studying them.

It was not a typical choice for a guy who's wandering around Ohio barefoot in rags to become a proselytizer of New Church doctrine.

So he was he was a the person in that way, but he was determined to try to win converts to the New Church wherever he went.

And so the New Church is one of those many, many, many varieties that are flourishing in the Second Great Awakening, but it's not one of them that is as successful.

The heart religions see much greater success than the head religions at that time.

This is American History Hotline.

I'm your host Bob Crawford.

Today.

My guest is William Kerrigan, author of the book Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard Cultural History.

We're talking about the man, the myth, the legend, Johnny Appleseed.

And Hey, do you have questions about American history?

If so, send them our way, record yourself using the voice memo app on your phone and email it to American History Hotline at gmail dot com.

That's American History Hotline at gmail dot com.

Now back to the show, Bill, I love what you're like.

You're you are illuminating so much about Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman and the Second grade awakening.

Awakening is a time is very fascinating to me.

I've done a lot of reading about it.

I did not I never connected Johnny Appleseed with this movement.

So you're telling me about a man who is an entrepreneur.

He is also almost like the social Gospel, right.

He sounds like he's trying to use his profession to profess his faith yep, and to share his faith.

And somewhere out of all of this, a legend is born, a myth, an American myth is born.

Tell me about how that came to be.

So, yeah, I think it's a very interesting question.

Why did so many stories surround this peculiar individual?

And I think part of the answer to that is to look at when the stories really started to spread, and the map to map out the places that John Chapman went to.

When he arrived in northwest Pennsylvania as a young man living in pretty primitive conditions, the only other European people there were a lot like him.

They were living in primitive conditions.

When he moved into Ohio in the first years of the nineteenth century.

The first places he was at were mostly still in these frontier settlements, so he might have seemed a little strange, but this was a time when you would run into strange people all the time.

When he arrived in Ohio about eighteen oh one, the first time, there were only forty thousand people in the state.

When he died in eighteen forty five, there's one and a half a million people in the state.

He parks himself in Ohio for about four decades, and the world around him starts to change a lot, and he doesn't change much.

So by the time he's an old man, there are canals and roads and even railroads that are connecting every town in Ohio to national and international markets.

People have access to nicer clothes, store bought te all sorts of things.

They are becoming consumers, and the lifestyle of those who had been around had changed for most people.

But John Chapman doesn't change.

He's committed to frugality.

He's committed to living with just the most basic needs.

He becomes a symbol of the lost Frontier, and the Americans are kind of have this ambivalence towards modernity.

On one side, we embrace change and improvement, but then we also have nostalgia for what was lost in the past and Chapman becomes an enveering figure because he seems to represent these these old values of being helpful to your neighbors and not worrying about striving and getting ahead.

And so people start talking about them, and they start telling stories, and then they exaggerate those stories as they're passed along, and they come to be tall tales.

I think most of the tall tales do reflect certain aspects of his actual character, even if the tale itself is not entirely believable.

Is it true that he was a vegetarian.

Ah, this is a great So he's very commonly called the vegetarian.

Now.

When I was doing research in northwest Pennsylvania, one of my good best sources because he didn't leave a diet or anything where the dry goods store ledgers from stores, or he went in and bought things.

People didn't have cash, So you wrote down what you took and what you might have given an exchange, and sometime down down the road those accounts would be settled.

But at one entry from a dry goods store in Franklin, Pennsylvania, the young John Chapman bought gunpowder, pork whiskey, chocolate, had two pairs of moccasins.

So in this one entry was he was always barefoot.

Well, sometimes you he was a vegetarian.

He's got pork, he is buying gunpowder, he carries a gun.

A lot of the the myths of him as never carried a gun completely vegetarian certainly wasn't true in his years in Pennsylvania.

However, there is a lot of evidence that he embraced vegetariatism later in life, and he may have gotten that even through his Swedenborgian faith, because there was a splinter group of Swedenborgians who who embraced vegetarian aboutism about that time, so late in life you hit you hear stories about he hired a young man to help him do some work clearing land for a nursery, and when it came lunch, he was expected to provide lunch for the young man, and he offered the young man a handful of walnuts for lunch, and this young man did quit walked off.

At that time.

That he wouldn't harm an animal seems to be very true.

Sometimes he took in horses that had no value because they were so broken down and just cared for them.

I think it is likely that he became a full fledged vegetarian at some point in his life, but he certainly didn't start out that way, and I think that's something he embraced along the way.

You did reference Saint Francis, yes, and who was very much a naturalist, right, And so are there these power like how deep does the parallel go?

I think the parallels are pretty deep.

He did seem to have extraordinary empathy for all living things at a time on a frontier where that was very uncommon, And a lot of the tall tales are about how far he would go with this.

One of the crazier ones is he was sleeping in the woods on an early fall day when it's cold out, and he starts a fire to keep warm, and he notices that mosquitoes are flying into the flames to their death, and he's so horrified by this he puts the fire out and shivers for the night rather than kill mosquitoes.

Was he claimed to have been expressed deep regret for striking a snake that bid him while he was clearing ground, and then he did it sort of as a natural reaction and killed a snake.

And then he said, you know, the snake was just protecting itself, and I feel terrible about killing the snake.

The story about him crawling into a hollow tree trunk to sleep one night, to discover that there were some bears in there, and then him leaving it for the bears.

Many of these stories were probably made up.

But I think the point that the tall tale tellers were making was this guy cared about non human life in really really extreme ways, and they found that curious, and maybe they found it just weird, or maybe they found it endearing.

Before we parted, I got I got two questions for you.

First, in your research, when were the earliest mythic stories like he dies in eighteen forty five?

He said, yes, yeah, And so when did.

You start to see When do we start to see the telling of Johnny Applesy to the school kids?

And when does the myth begin to take hold?

What's he a living legend?

No, so he was a local, living legend for during his life.

What's interesting is at the time he dies, one of the only things that's been written about him is in a bulletin produced by the Church of the New Jerusalem in Manchester, England in eighteen seventeen.

They already know him because he is he's sending letters to them, sending money so they'll send him books to distribute.

But they described in detail that he's planting trees and he's living this primitive existence and he's proselytizing.

That's one of the very few things that's written about him during his life.

Even in his obituary in eighteen forty five in Fort Wayne in a Fort Wayne newspaper, they described his life a little bit, but they don't know where he came from.

There's very little details.

One of the most curious thing that the obituary writer put in there was he was not less than eighty years old at the time of his death.

Though no person would have judged him from his appearance that he was sixty, he was in fact seventy one, so he over aged him, probably because of his peculiarity in his frontier qualities.

But he also seemed to be acknowledging that he was remarkably fit for somebody that age.

But only after that he died do we start to see some things coming to print.

This young novelist and writer of fiction named Rosella Rice, who had known that Johnny Applety when she was a little girl.

She starts to write stories about him.

In eighteen seventy one, a Unitarian minister in Mansfield, Ohio who turned journalists publishes an article in Harper's Monthly Magazine, which is a national magazine.

That's the first time you get this very national story.

And then in eighteen eighty Lydia Maria Child who wrote American Trubal Housewife, among other things, and she wrote a poem that was published in national magazines called Applety John.

And those early accounts are the national story.

But then what also starts happening about the same time is every county in Ohio starts to publish its own county history, and the local stories that people have been telling in their families start to appear in those late nineteenth century county histories.

So they really kind of unfold over a long period of time.

What's really remarkable is how little actually makes it the print during his lifetime.

And he but he was referred to during his lifetime by some as Johnny Appleseed.

Yes, no one in northwestern Pennsylvania knew him by that name, but he was called Johnny Appleseed or Appleseed John.

We do have one document he signed.

I think it was an IOU and he signed it apple Seed John, so the name had stuck with him that that happened that emerged in his Ohio years.

Though, Well, Bill, this has been so much fun.

I really enjoyed talking with you today.

I've learned a lot.

My last question for you is what is your favorite apple?

My favorite apple is I like antique apples that are hard to find.

One.

It's called the Cox's Orange Pippins, and it's an old English apple that if you really haunt places that have heritage apple orchards you might find one.

It actually tastes similar to your cosmic crisp.

I would say I appreciate all kinds of apples, but the Cox's Orange Pippen, I would have to say, is the best tasting apple I've ever had.

William Kerrigan.

The book is Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard, a Cultural History Bill.

Thanks for joining us today on American History Hotline.

Thank you, Bob, I really enjoyed speaking with you.

You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions.

The show is executive producer is James Morrison.

Our executive producers from iHeart are Jordan Runtall and Jason English.

Original music composed by me, Bob Crawford.

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