William Kerrigan. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. xii and 231 pp., maps, illustrations, notes, index. $25.00 paper (ISBN 978-1-4214-0729-6).
In 1951, the city of Athens, Ohio, added a small triangular sliver of land to its inventory of public parks. Located at the intersection where West Carpenter Street meets Mound Street, this “pocket” park is so small that few neighborhood residents—most of them students attending Ohio University—realize it is there or why it was established. A stone monument erected by the Garden Club Association of Ohio offers a clue: “In memory of Johnny Appleseed. A wandering planter of fruit trees in the wilderness, whose work has inspired following generations to plant trees and beautify Ohio.” Although it is doubtful that John Chapman, also known as Johnny Appleseed, ever planted seeds or distributed trees in this part of the state, he is commemorated here—and elsewhere across the country—for the beliefs he espoused and the religious principles by which he lived. Schools, parks, highways, and annual festivals all bear his name. Scores of books purport to tell the story of his life. As historian William Kerrigan shows us in this thoroughly researched and compelling new volume, Chapman was a far more complex figure than the mythic image of the barefoot wanderer would have us believe.
Born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1774, Chapman's childhood years offer us a glimpse of rural life in the American colonies during an extraordinarily tumultuous period. Not long after his birth, his father, Nathaniel, joined the Continental Army, leaving his wife, Elizabeth, to raise their two children. When Elizabeth succumbed to tuberculosis a short time later, John and his older sister were left in the care of relatives. After Nathaniel remarried in 1780, he sent for his children, resettling them in Longmeadow, just south of Springfield, Massachusetts. For a brief period, the family prospered in this tight-knit community where rigid religious orthodoxy all but ensured social conformity. Nathaniel and his new wife, Lucy, farmed their land and had several more children together. Then disaster struck. Committed to paying off its war debts as quickly as possible, the state legislature, in 1784, determined that the best way to raise revenue was to place the burden of new taxes on persons and property. Unable to come up with the necessary hard currency, many Massachusetts farmers—Chapman's father among them—lost title to their lands. And so, “by necessity rather than choice,” writes Kerrigan, “John was loosed from a crowded landscape and from many of the constraints of condition and patriarchy” (p. 35). He left home at sixteen and never looked back.
Where exactly John Chapman went is difficult to say given the paucity of historical evidence and questionable reliability of oral tradition. The scant records that do exist suggest he made his way to the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. Quite possibly, it was here that the idea to sell apple trees in frontier settlements first came to him. According to Kerrigan, “In a region where legal title to virtually every piece of land was contested, an orchard marked one's claim, and a mature orchard could provide evidence of the longevity of that claim. As a result, two- or three-year-old seedling trees could demand a price of six pence apiece in the Wyoming Valley, as new settlers sought to buy time toward a mature orchard” (p. 38). Already familiar with multiple varieties of the fruit—having grown up in a landscape where apple trees were ubiquitous—Chapman would also have been aware of its value in the production of hard cider, a beverage that supplanted beer in many households because of the great difficulty farmers encountered trying to grow barley in New England's rocky soils. Collecting seeds discarded by local cider mills, Chapman established his nurseries in isolated areas, within walking distance and near a water source. Although historical records indicate that he did, in fact, own property at different times in his life, he tended to plant his seeds on property he did not own. In some cases he appears to have paid some sort of rent, either in money or apples. More often, he was a squatter on absentee-owned lands. Cognizant of the advancing settlement frontier and always ready to take advantage of new opportunities, Chapman did his best to stay one step ahead of each successive wave of migration, journeying west across Pennsylvania, then into Ohio, and, finally, on to Indiana. Hardly a “wanderer,” as the stone marker in Athens asserts, Chapman's movements were calculated to guarantee a market for his seedlings. Likewise, it is unlikely that Chapman planted “fruit trees in the wilderness” simply to “beautify” the countryside. His motives were probably more pragmatic and self-serving.
Chapman might have shifted his geographic location over the years but he did not radically alter his practices. Believing that “the proper and natural mode was to raise fruit trees from seed,” Chapman never embraced grafting as an alternative (p. 143). First and foremost, seeds were easier to transport over long distances—an important consideration given Chapman's frequent movements. There were other reasons as well. For Chapman's forebears, there was a decided advantage to planting seeds. As Kerrigan notes, “Planting from seed not only preserved scarce capital and labor, but it enabled farmers to ‘laboratory test’ their trees” (p. 11). The trees that proved their hardiness in the farmer's nursery were transferred to the orchard. Those that failed the test were discarded. Long after labor shortages and access to capital ceased to be problems and despite the fact that the fruit from seed trees often proved inferior, Chapman continued to plant seeds. His practices remained consistent even when seedling trees came to be “associated with the poor, the idle, [and] the unambitious” (p. 82).
Of course, no book about Johnny Appleseed would be complete if it did not explore his reputation for asceticism and frugality. “Clothing himself in the cast-off rags of those around him who had since adopted finer accoutrements, preferring to go barefoot even after shoes were abundant and cheap, subsisting on the meanest fare, and getting by without a permanent shelter, John Chapman appeared to be living his life in opposition to the new materialism of his age,” writes Kerrigan, adding that in 1810, “his rough appearance and primitive lifestyle might have been understood as a result of personal poverty and the general scarcity of frontier life, but by 1830 it surely struck those who knew him as a personal choice” (p. 127). How can we account for the fact that Chapman—a relatively successful, if not especially astute, businessman—rejected the simple comforts that many of his neighbors, even those of more modest means, enjoyed? Kerrigan speculates that Chapman's exposure to utopian ideas and his religious convictions—he was a Swedenborgian Christian—influenced his decision to remain celibate and to eschew material possessions. At the time of his death, it is almost certain he was viewed as a somewhat eccentric and unconventional frontier character. After publication of H. D. Haley's profile in Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1871, however, he emerged a larger-than-life “pioneer hero,” an image that was revived in the post–World War II era to distinguish U.S. values from those of our Cold War adversaries.
Clearly, Kerrigan deserves credit for carefully and skillfully piecing together a biography of John Chapman—one that departs from the caricatures of the past. Arguably, the book's true value lies elsewhere. Using Chapman's life as a vehicle, Kerrigan transports us back in time to a period when “Indians and whites lived in close proximity … but also in tension,” and when speculators and ordinary settlers battled one another for control of great swaths of land (p. 46). As the tools and technologies of the Industrial Revolution diffused across the Midwest, he shows us how they altered forever the way we think about and produce the fruit Chapman worked all his life to grow and distribute. Perhaps even more important, he exposes the political and cultural forces that transformed a humble collector and planter of apple seeds into an American icon. In so doing, he causes us to experience and appreciate places like Appleseed Park in Athens, Ohio, in altogether new and different ways.