Johnny Appleseed Day

What the day is

Johnny Appleseed Day is observed on September 26, the birthday of John Chapman, born in Massachusetts in 1774. A second observance is sometimes held in March, marking his death, but the September date is the more widely kept.

Chapman is one of the few American folk figures who was straightforwardly real, and the legend has drifted a long way from what he actually did.

Origin and background

The storybook version has a barefoot wanderer scattering seeds at random across the frontier. The reality was a business. Chapman moved ahead of settlement into Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania, established fenced nurseries on land he acquired, raised seedlings, and sold or traded the young trees to arriving settlers. He returned periodically to tend the plots. It was itinerant work, but it was planned.

The trees themselves explain much of it. Apples grown from seed do not reproduce their parent variety, so seedling orchards produce fruit that is mostly sour and often barely edible. That was not a problem, because the crop was largely destined for cider, which on the frontier was a safer and more durable drink than water and a form of currency besides. Chapman's opposition to grafting, which came from his religious convictions, meant his trees stayed seedlings.

He was also a missionary for the Swedenborgian church, lived extremely frugally by choice, and was known for a gentleness toward animals that the legend did keep. He died in 1845, having accumulated substantial landholdings.

How to take part

• Eat an apple, or better, drink cider. Hard cider is closer to what his trees were actually for.
• Plant a tree. Autumn is a reasonable planting window in much of the country, and a grafted variety will fruit far sooner than a seedling.
• Read past the storybook. The real biography is more interesting than the barefoot myth.
• Visit a heritage orchard if one is nearby. Many preserve old cider varieties that commercial growing abandoned.
• Save your seeds and plant one anyway, knowing the fruit will be a lottery. That uncertainty is the whole point of his orchards.