 Find out Facts about Johnny Appleseed by playing.... Johnny Appleseed Internet Hunt  Who was Johnny Appleseed? Johnny Appleseed was born on September 26, 1774 in Leominster, Massachussetts. His real name was John Chapman. He died at the age of 70 from a bout with pneumonia. His story has become one of the infamous folklore stories told year after year. And so it goes....
Johnny wanted to provide apple trees to the new settlers moving slowly westward. He also was a missionary, or spokesperson, for the Sweden- borgians, a Christian group named after Emanuel Swedenborg.
Johnny Appleseed spent time in western Pennsylvania and many years in Ohio. He was supposed to have been a very
self-reliant man, finding his own food and sleeping outdoors. Frontier settlers soon began calling the strange young man "Johnny Appleseed".
It was once reported in an early newspaper that Johnny Appleseed wore a "coarse coffee sack, with a hole cut in the center" for his head. No-one's sure if this was true or not, but it would lead one to believe that he was a man of simple means. They say he wore a tin pot on his head for a hat! Johnny Appleseed was not a poor man though. He had
money, but he used it for charity and to further his work rather than for his personal comfort.
Johnny Appleseed usually planted his apple orchards along streams. His earliest known apple nursery was planted about nine
miles below Steubenville, Ohio, in a narrow valley near the Ohio River. Johnny Appleseed located his apple orchards near the main settlement routes and then traveled from one to another to care for the trees and sell seedlings to the settlers. Apples were very important to the early settlers. They were the easiest fruit to grow and to store for year-round use without adding expensive sugar. Families dried bushels of
apples to eat during the winter. They made apple butter, apple cider and for a special treat apple pies and turnovers.
But Johnny Appleseed didn't wander the Midwest giving away apple seedlings and seeds, as many believe. He was a
businessman and this was his business. Today, many tales tell of Johnny Appleseed scattering seeds along the trails to the west; however this is simply one way of the tales becoming "taller" as the years go by.
In 1806 the price of a seedling apple tree was 6 or 7 cents, and this was what Johnny usually charged for his trees. Many say,
however, that if settlers couldn't pay he would accept cornmeal or old clothes or a promise to pay in the future and he supposedly did give trees to needy families. Johnny's seedlings were produced strictly from seeds of apples and, although his quality was surpassed by many, he planted many more nurseries than anyone else. It is estimated that he planted over 100,000 square miles of orchards spanning throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana. Because of where and when he planted his nurseries, he became the most successful of the nurserymen and obviously one of the most well-known.
Johnny's technique was to come to an
area and borrow, lease or buy a plot of ground for his nursery. He would clear the ground, prepare the soil and plant his trees,
using seeds he had gathered from cider mills back east.
Many stories have been told about Johnny Appleseed over the years and no-one knows for sure which ones are true and which ones are not. Some say he was a vegetarian and never carried a weapon. Some say he actually put out a campfire to keep a mosquito from being burned.
Another story told is that he once slept in the snow rather than a warm cave so that he wouldn't disturb a sleeping bear and her cubs. I personally think he may have done this to save his own skin? Sleeping with a mother bear in her den doesn't seem too safe to me?!
No matter how you look at it, Johnny Appleseed is definitely a man to be admired. He contributed much to the American society, that we can benefit from even still today. Thank you Johnny Appleseed for all you have done!
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