Johnny Appleseed Was Not Like You've Been Told. These 9 Facts Tell the Real Story
by N/A, 10 years ago |
2 min read
John Chapman, AKA Johnny Appleseed, was a mysterious man, and there's a lot of folk lore surrounding him. We have some facts though that paint a slightly clearer picture.Â
1. Johnny Appleseed's father was a minuteman in the Revolutionary War.
2. He's portrayed as a sort of wide-eyed wanderer who just traveled around without a care in the world, but actually he was able to gather a TON of land mass by planting so many orchards. It was extremely practical.
3. His appearance, though, is just about correct, but it's not because he wasn't this huge land baron.
 He belonged to the Church of Swedenborg, and it seems likely the clothing and the bare feet were common to people of that denomination. Also he really did carry around a sack of apples because he didn't believe in grafting.Â
4. He carried around something else his whole life because of his faith—his virginity.
5. Johnny Appleseed grew "spitters," or apples that you would never want to eat. They were used for making cider or sometimes apple jack.
6. There is a tree in Nova, Ohio that is 176 years old, and it is the last known Johnny Appleseed-planted tree!
7. If Johnny Appleseed weren't such a strong believer in seeds and so anti-grafting, we wouldn't have the apples we have today.
Apples that come from grafting stay exactly the same as their parent apple, so all the varieties we have access to today are likely available largely in part because of Johnny Appleseed.Â
8. Much of Johnny Appleseed's precious trees were destroyed by prohibitionist FBI agents trying to stop people from making hard cider.
9. The nickname—and the folk lore celebrity status—only happened after death.
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