There Really Was A Johnny Appleseed, by Ted Clarke
Published by Ted Clarke at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 by Ted Clarke
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There Really Was A Johnny Appleseed
By Ted Clarke
Chapter 1 - Life in Leominster
Chapter 2 - How to Develop an Apple Missionary
Chapter 3 - On to Pennsylvania
Chapter 4 - The Allegheny Region
Chapter 5 - Swedenborgiansim and the Good Book
Chapter 6 - Crossing Into Ohio
Chapter 7 - The War of 1812
Chapter 8 - The Land Owner
Chapter 9 - West to Indiana
SIDEBARS
Supply Problems for Washington's Army
Deerfield Raid and the Longmeadow Minister
The Susquehanna and the War Between Connecticut and Pennsylvania
Anthony Wayne and the Conflict with American Indians
INTRODUCTION -- WHAT MADE JOHNNY APPLESEED?
What’s your favorite apple?
Are you one of those people who like them crisp and red and tart with a starkly white interior?
Maybe you prefer sweet and juicy -- or mealy -- or golden -- or green? Apples come in 7500 varieties, though you may have to go to a roadside orchard to find what you want.
There’s an orchard like that in Leominster, MA, and we’re lucky it’s there. The orchard is part of a large tract of land called Sholan Farms, and in the fall, you can pick a bagful of your favorites and eat them anyway you want.
You’d be picking apples in a farm that once belonged to the family of John Chapiman, better known as Johnny Appleseed. If he could talk to you, John would no doubt tell you how pleased he was to have you enjoying apples here in his old hometown. Being a wonderful storyteller, he’d probably also tell you about how the ordinary people of Leominster all got together to save this farm when the owner had moved away and wanted to sell it as a housing subdivision. John was always in favor of growing trees rather than cutting them down, and conserving the things of nature. So the highpoint of his story would be how the city bought the land and made it into a working farm and a center for conservation and environmentally friendly activities.
Probably Johnny would have let you know that this was the right thing to do and that he approved because he was a friend to nature – plants and animals and all kinds of growing things. There are many stories about how he lived alone in the wild and cared about wildlife.
It was said that he could get birds to eat out of his hand. He’d been able to do that as a small boy. He would give a certain whistle and a chickadee or cardinal would come down out of a tree and eat whatever he had for them.
Then there’s a story that he once put out his campfire because the smoke was interfering with mosquitoes who were hovering over it. And speaking of fires, he once built one at the end of a hollow log and was prepared to spend the night inside the log when he realized that the log was already occupied. He found a mother bear and her cubs sleeping inside. John wouldn’t displace them in order to add to his own comfort. Instead he put out his fire and spent the night out in the snow. It was even said that he had once killed a rattlesnake that had bit him and he regretted it the rest of his life.
According to legend, Johnny was like that. But, are these stories true? And if they are, what made Johnny, born along the Nashua River in Leominster near this orchard, the man he was and the legend he became?
A lot of little things fit together like a puzzle to make John Chapman into “Johnny Appleseed”. And he does fit together like a puzzle. He went from his early years in Massachusetts to one of America’s most beloved folk heroes and he did it quietly and steadily without a lot of fanfare. He’s more of a folk hero than a person. But Johnny Appleseed was a real person.
America loves its folk heroes. Most of them became part of the scenery of an expanding America when people from the original thirteen East Coast colonies crossed the mountains as pioneers and settled the vast and opening midlands and beyond. That was when Americans thought big thoughts, flexed their muscles and showed their courage.
We had heroes like Paul Bunyan, the fabled lumberjack who cleared the land and felled the timber to make room for new growth; John Henry, mighty muscled man who drove steel and laid the tracks for railroads that were starting to span the country to connect the east and west. Others, too, represented the adventurous spirit of post-Revolution America. Some really lived; others seemed as though they should have. Paul Bunyan was a complete myth. John Henry existed, but his legendary deeds stretched far beyond the real ones. Their stories are commonly known as Tall Tales.
Johnny Appleseed was real. His name was John Chapman and he came from Leominster, Massachusetts. His deeds, too, were stretched into legend, but the reality was nearly as strange as the legend, and his actual deeds and life style make the man as remarkable as the legend.
You can find lots of people who think Johnny Appleseed was no more than a story. He’s typically viewed as a strange character who traveled through the opening territories planting apple trees and reading Bible verses while communing with nature. That’s the legend. It’s also the truth.
Johnny provided the foundation from which the legend arose. He may have looked strange wearing his burlap coffee sack with cutout armholes for a tunic, three pairs of breeches, and his bare feet. The iron pot we see in cartoons is almost an icon for Johnny, but it’s probably mostly a myth.
Johnny did tell wonderful stories and he did speak clearly with inspiring words. It was true that he spent much of his time deep in the woods where he was known to converse with Indians and even animals, and if he did stay overnight in a settlement he was likely to sleep outside or in a hollowed out tree. Even if it were extremely cold and he came inside for the night, he’d stretch out on the hearth and spout verses from the Bible, or “The Good Book” as he called it. He espoused a religion called Swedenborgianism. It took a lot of reading and a lot of thinking to follow, so John had to be a good reader and an intellectual.
Chapman/Appleseed was a forerunner of western expansion into the area beyond the Alleghenies – western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. He was remarkably accurate in predicting just where new settlement would take place and he helped make it happen. He went into the Ohio territory and planted apple tree nurseries – lots of them. A few years later, when settlers came along, they bought the trees to be used on their homesteads. Besides eating them, they used the apples to make vinegar to preserve foods and cider, which provided an alcoholic beverage, especially when made into applejack or apple brandy.
When America became a new nation, it also acquired from Britain, the land between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, and this was where an expanding population would go. Chapman led them into this area. To pay its debts to the soldiers who had fought in the Revolution, the government made these lands available, but in order to qualify for a homestead, settlers in the new territories had to plant orchards. That’s where Johnny came in. He went west before they did, planted the trees and had them ready when easterners arrived. Chapman’s “spade work” paid off, and within a short time enough settlers had come to Ohio to make it a state.
The timing of Chapman’s forays into the new area coincided perfectly with the mood of America. Not only did he provide new growth in a new area, but those who followed him brought growth to America in a different way. America needed a Johnny Appleseed just then, and John Chapman was that man.
He was like a salesman, going among the homes of pioneers, offering seedlings and bringing gifts and stories. But he was mostly there to sell his brand of religion and to offer himself as a model for good, pure living.
But people welcomed him, regardless of whether he was strange or not. He brought small gifts for the children, bits of ribbon or cloth for the girls, toys for the boys, perhaps herbs for the mother.
There’s more to the legend, and more to the truth. It’s on-line, it’s in libraries, and it’s just ahead.
CHAPTER ONE – LIFE IN LEOMINSTER
Even John Chapman’s family background has some curious ironies. The Chapmans were of English stock. Edward Chapman came from Shropshire, landed in Boston in 1639 and settled three years later in Ipswich, Massachusetts where he lived as a farmer and a miller.When he died, his will provided his second wife with
“… ten good bearing fruit trees near the end of the house.”
So orchards came early to the Chapman family.
Five generations later, Johnny’s father, Nathaniel Chapman, married Elizabeth, daughter of James Simonds. Elizabeth’s family had arrived in Boston four years earlier than the Chapmans.
Her father, James was descended from William Simons (the “d” was apparently added later) who had arrived in Boston in 1635 on a ship with the destiny-drenched name of the Planter, and settled later in Woburn, Massachusetts.
After their marriage, Nathaniel and Elizabeth Chapman moved in 1740 to Leominster, making him one of the town’s earliest settlers. There he built a fine frame house that lasted for 150 years.
William Simonds, Johnny’s maternal grandfather, departed from the standard religion of the time with its Calvinistic gloominess. A new minister had imbued in him a more liberal version called Unitarianism that was beginning to infiltrate New England communities at just this time. A rift between the two religious strains was just ahead, and John Chapman, when he came along, would be open to divergent religious thought. Indeed, he became famous for it among other things.
Not only was there liberal thought in Johnny’s lineage, but intelligence and more orneriness were there too. His mother’s cousin, Benjamin Thompson, of Woburn had become wealthy by marrying well, moved to New Hampshire, and had worked against the rebel cause in the early days of the Revolution.
SIDEBAR – Benjamin Thompson
Thompson (who later became Count Rumford) had narrowly escaped a sticky situation when Patriots came to his house to tar and feather him and dashed out just before they got there. Thompson made it behind the British lines and at once became a spy for their General Gage. Thompson was always enterprising like that. He became a big bump on the log and his story is fascinating.
He went next to England where he became a favorite of King George III and was knighted. After some time he traveled to Europe where he at last went into the service of the Elector of Palatine in Bavaria, became his minister of war and was made Count Rumford. You’ll note that Thompson/Rumford had made big strides in short moments. Rumford was also a successful scientist. He did experiments with gunpowder and heat energy and invented the Rumford Stove, which became very popular in older houses.
We have here a stark contrast between these second cousins: Rumford became rich, decried the rebel cause, moved to England and Europe and sowed the seeds of scientific thought, while his cousin, Johnny, a rebel and the son of a rebel, donned pioneer garb, went forth into rural regions with true American spirit, and planted seeds that helped pioneers sustain themselves in these new places.
Johnny eschewed riches, inspired the spirits of the newcomers, dealt kindly with nature and became (paradoxically) an icon for both conservation and growth.
John Chapman was born to Nathaniel and Elizabeth Chapman on September 26, 1774, just at the brink of apple-picking time. Much of what we know to be true about John comes from the Leominster part of his life, which lasted for only a few years. The information came from a zealous and industrious Leominster librarian, Miss Florence Wheeler, who went digging as recently as 1939 and unearthed his genealogy.
His birth record has been uncovered, too, from the meetinghouse in Leominster. It reads like this:
“John Chapman Sun (sic) of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Chapman
Born at Leominster September ye 26th 1774”
Johnny had a sister, Elizabeth, four years older than he. Their home was rented from a relative of his mother. The father, Nathaniel, used the rented land for farming, and he sold the grains and vegetables he raised. But he seems not to have raised and sold well, since Nathaniel Chapman had to supplement his meager income by hiring himself out as a carpenter. Carpentry, though, turned out to be a fortunate choice, since he’d shortly make good use of that second career while he was in the military.
At the time Johnny came along, the carpenter connection had already moved closer to reality, since Worcester County, where Leominster is located, had voted, five days before Johnny’s birth, that every town had to enlist one third of its men between ages 16 and 60 “to be ready to act at a minute’s warning.” Because of this requirement, these enlistees were therefore known as “Minutemen.” Leominster had 99 of them, including Johnny’s father, Nathaniel, and his mother’s brother Zebedee Simonds.
Johnny’s father and the rest of the minutemen drilled daily on the open field in the center of Leominster called the village green. You could have heard them from Johnny’s house. The drumbeat of their drill would have filled his ears on Muster Day when his mother would have been holding her toddler aloft as the Minutemen paraded before the whole assembled town.
SIDEBAR – The Coming of the Revolution
That kind of readiness and zeal was felt far beyond Leominster and across the breadth of the colonies. That same September when Johnny was born brought the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia where the American colonies, including Massachusetts sent representatives to address their grievances against Parliament and the king.
The people of Leominster were patriots. A few weeks earlier, the citizens of Johnny’s town had written a long letter to send by express rider to the other towns in Massachusetts.
Before it was sent, the minister read it aloud in church. It read in part:
“… We must awaken and stir up every person to a rough sense of the real certainty there now is of America being reduced to the most abject slavery and poverty….”
The British viewed that kind of talk as treason and were determined to bend the colonials to their will. They took action, closing Boston Harbor, banning town meetings and elections, and appointing General Gage as Governor of Massachusetts.
The Americans were equally furious and they took counter-actions, forming Committees of Correspondence to resist the British and meeting to take concerted action. The delegates, who included leaders such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and John Hancock called on all colonies to stop trading with the British and urged Massachusetts to arm itself.
Massachusetts didn’t need any urging, but the support was nice to have. By early 1775 colonists had hidden cannons and gunpowder in several locations and the British soldiers had become concerned about these caches. They had already made forays to capture some of these supplies, but without much success.
Now in the days of John Chapman’s life, the nearby port of Boston fairly teemed with spies, mostly funneling facts to the Sons of Liberty. But the British had informers, too, and even a mole. Their intelligence said that minutemen had stashed gunpowder in the town of Concord, a short march from Boston. They had collateral information that they thought they could use in tandem with the first. They learned that John Hancock and Sam Adams, two of the American ringleaders who had vacated Boston, were holed up in Lexington, right near Concord.
The British decided to strike in both places, catch the rebels, and then march on to Concord to ferret out the hidden gunpowder. Gage thought his men could march out and back, accomplish both tasks and all without resistance. He gauged incorrectly.
The Sons of Liberty knew what he was up to almost before he did. They knew what he would do, but not when or how. When they learned that soldiers were boarding boats and crossing the Charles River, they knew which road the troops would take, and two signal lanterns were lit in the Old North Church so that Paul Revere could ride through the night with thundering hoof beats and spread his famous alarm.
Johnny was involved in all of this, though he didn’t know it at the time, being just a baby with bright blue eyes and the nascent appearance of some straight black hair. Nearer than he knew, his father Nathaniel and the Leominster minutemen started out for Lexington, but it had taken a while for the alarm to reach them, twenty miles northwest of Lexington.
The Leominster men began their march, but were too late for the skirmish on Lexington Green where 700 British faced 70 Minutemen and killed eight of them when someone unknown fired what came to be known as “the shot heard ‘round the world.” That shot resounded because it then became clear that Americans would stand their ground. They would take arms to protect their rights and freedoms. They would be a force for British reckoning.
When Nathaniel Chapman and his confreres arrived at Lexington Green they were too late to shoot at British soldiers, who were already hightailing it back to Boston after being chased from Concord. But he and his company did take part in the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. It was a battle witnessed from afar by Abigail Adams and her son John Quincy. The Americans had fortified the high point of Breed’s Hill in Charlestown, and from where they could threaten the city and the British troops, so they had to be dislodged. It took three frontal assaults to do it, but the defenders finally ran out of ammunition and had to retreat after killing 1100 British soldiers.
Meanwhile, the rumor mill was grinding out stories of danger and fear. One said that smallpox was spreading through eastern Massachusetts and would soon infect people in Johnny’s town of Leominster. According to rumor, the British intended to raid the small towns of Middlesex County, burn down the houses and kill the women and children while their husbands were off fighting in the militia.
These rumors took root. Two sisters in Leominster believed that story so well that they stayed in a room with their children with a sharpened ax and pitchfork under their bed.
The truth was that Johnny’s father and the other minutemen kept Gage and his redcoats bottled up in Boston until Henry Knox and some others brought captured cannon all the way from Ft. Ticonderoga in upstate New York and forced the British to escape Boston by sea. They sailed to Halifax and then to New York. Washington’s army, including Nathaniel Chapman, then moved to Long Island to defend New York from General Howe’s imminent invasion.
Nathaniel had by that time enlisted in the continental army and had become part of the construction battalion where he could use his secondary skill of carpentry. He eventually reached the rank of captain. The Battle of Long Island was a disaster for the Americans who were badly outnumbered and also outfoxed. Washington pulled off one of his patented retreats and his army lived to fight another day, but it would be four months before the Americans could take heart from a victory in Trenton, New Jersey.
Meanwhile, Johnny’s mother, Elizabeth, was in a battle of her own against pervasive tuberculosis, and had trouble running the farm in Nathaniel’s absence. Besides her usual household chores, she – like other wives of the American Revolution -- had to weed and hoe the crops by hand, a long and arduous daily task, despite her failing health and her third pregnancy, which was near at hand. She could not afford to buy a cow as she told her husband in a letter to him, care of Capt. Pollard’s company of Carpenters with Washington in New York.
Her letter (which he kept) shows the straits in which she found herself and is an extant example of the type of communication between man and wife in that period. (The correspondence between Abigail and John Adams is an exceptional difference.)
Loving husband,
These lines come with my affectionate regards to you hoping they will find you in health, tho I still continue in a very weak and low condition. I am no better than I was when you left me, but rather worse, and I would be very glad if you would come and see me, for I want to see you.
Our children are both well thro the Divine goodness.
I rejoice to hear that you are well and I pray that you may thus continue and in God’s due time be returned in safetly. … I desire your prayers for me … that I may so improve my remainder of life that I may answer the great end for which I was made, that I might glorify God here and finally come to the enjoyment of Him in a world of glory…and so I must bid you farewell and if I should be so ordered that I should not see you again I hope that we shall both be as happy as to spend an eternity of happiness together. So I conclude by subscribing myself, you
Ever loving and affectionate wife,
Elizabeth Chapman
The letter was sent on June 3, 1776. Nathaniel would already have been in New York, preparing for the British invasion. He would not see action, but would work on fortifications.
Nathaniel Chapman had not had an easy life. He had lost his mother when he was only six, and seldom said anything about his early life. What he did say was that the best moment of his life had been the day in 1769 when he married his love, Elizabeth. Sadly, it would not be a long marriage.
On July 15, 1776, Leominster celebrated the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, written mainly by Thomas Jefferson. The town, evidently waxing enthusiastic, followed the Philadelphia example and recorded its own declaration of independence from Great Britain in the town record book. Settlement of the land beyond the mountains and John Chapman’s adventure were now one step closer to reality.
Celebrating was dimmed in the Chapman household, though. Elizabeth’s health worsened and she became bedridden. She gave birth to a son, named Nathaniel, but died on July 18. The baby survived her by less than a month and Johnny and his sister were now without a mother, while their father remained with the continental army.
For the next four years their maternal grandparents who still owned that modest frame house took them in. They were now in their late fifties, had raised nine older children, and were well schooled in parenting. That did not mean that they spent all day hovering over a young, curious and spirited young boy who would rather be out of the house exploring than inside under the watch of grandparents who no doubt had other things to do.
The situation meant that Johnny’s early childhood was spent near the banks of the Nashua River in Leominster, and in its woods and fields. During that time he undoubtedly learned to love nature, and being alone much of the time, must have learned to be at home by himself and with God’s other creatures. That, too, would be part of his foundation. It was an experience that would dovetail nicely with his next one and the one after that. Johnny was getting prepared for who he would become.
CHAPTER TWO -- HOW TO DEVELOP AN APPLE MISSIONARY
The next shift in Johnny’s life came at age six. His father, now 34, had been released from Washington’s continental army where his final post had been in Springfield, MA, about 100 miles west of Boston. In that position, his job had been to distribute military supplies.
The armory at Springfield was the supply post for the northern states. That same Henry Knox who had brought cannon through there on his way to Boston from Ft. Ticonderoga picked out the location. General Washington usually took Knox’s advice.
During the Revolution, Washington’s armies had run into major problems trying to get the supplies they needed. There were several reasons, and they created a sore point.
SIDEBAR--Supply Problems for Washington's Army
Nathaniel Chapman seemed fitted for the position he held in Springfield. But for some reason we haven’t found, he was dismissed from his job because of “unsatisfactory management of military stores.” Was he stealing, or selling government property? Whatever he was doing was serious, because he was dropped from the army payroll as of September 30, 1780 without a land bounty or pension.
That was a blow because most army veterans would receive a gift of land in the Northwest Territory as a bonus to pay them for their military service to their country. This “bonus” of land would be one of the factors leading to the opening of that land to settlement. It was kind of an 18th century version of the G.I. Bill.
Two months before his discharge, the 34-year-old Chapman had been making plans for his future. He had met Lucy Cooley, an 18-year-old woman from Longmeadow, just south of Springfield, whose family was among the earliest settlers of that historic village. Nathaniel and Lucy were married, and Chapman quickly prepared to move from Leominster to Longmeadow, gathering up his possessions as well as his daughter Elizabeth and his son John Chapman.
The newly-weds rented a house from a member of Lucy’s family. It was an old, unpainted and weather-beaten house at 135 Bliss Road (near the corner of Fairfield Terrace), a street that runs east-west through the town from the Connecticut River on the west and through a wooded area to the east. The house, which still stands (though greatly changed and expanded) was a house destined to become crowded, even overrun with children, since Nathaniel and Lucy had ten additional children at the rate of about one every two years, making 14 residents of the small dwelling.
A crowded house, overrun with small children, was not an appealing place for an energetic and curious pre-teen and teen like Johnny. He was driven to spend as much time as possible outside, just as he had previously ib Leominster. He had shown during his years in Leominster that he was a boy who loved nature, and here in Longmeadow, a town even more pastoral and rustic, he was out the door and onto the path west.
He spent a lot of time along the streams and in the woods. Stories are told of pet squirrels, rabbits and birds who fearlessly came to him at his whistle or call. He is said to have angered trappers by freeing animals who had been caught in traps. He took care of heir wounds and then released them into the wild. These boyhood traits are reflected in the later stories about him.
When he reached the frontier, for example, it was said that he would rescue horses that had been turned loose in the woods by their owners because they were worn out, had become useless as workhorses, and were near death. Johnny would actually search for these animals each fall and make arrangements with nearby settlers to take care of them and feed them until spring when he would take them to good pastures. If they became well enough to work, he still wouldn’t sell them. He would give them away.
There would also be the story of a wolf caught in a trap. He released it, cared for its wounds and nursed it back to health. It then became a pet and followed him around like a dog. So his rescues in Longmeadow foreshadowed his later good works.
As a small boy, he worked on the farm of Mr. Crawford, near his home. This farm had a large apple orchard on it, and lots of trees that had to be pruned and protected, their products picked. Crawford is credited with giving John his first training in the care of trees and fruit. He was a quick learner and he liked the work.
Apples and animals then, were important products of Johnny’s early days in Massachusetts. So was religion. We still see the steeples of plain white churches when we travel through small towns in that part of the country. In those towns, and in that era, religion was a part of everyone’s life and that would have included John Chapman, so perhaps it was not out of the ordinary for John to become a preacher and a planter, both of which he did.
He also went to school in the fabled New England one-room schoolhouse, and he took a lot away from his brief education. John Chapman became well read and well informed and the accounts of him tell us that he was quite intelligent.
John Chapman must have been a good student and received above average opportunity for formal education for his time. Stories say that he graduated from Harvard University, but this is doubtful since Harvard has no record of his registration. We do know that he read extensively and that his speech was that of a man of letters. This fact is mentioned over and over by people who knew him well. He was familiar with the Bible from cover to cover and every description of him includes an omnipresent Bible.
His everyday travels in and about Longmeadow helped to lay a foundation for his later and longer travels. Once he got out of that crowded house, he would have bounded off with the glee that comes with the liberty of spending your time just as you choose. We know from his Leominster period that he liked to spend time along the Nashua River. Another town, another river. John spent long days along the Connecticut River in Longmeadow as well.
When he left his home he would have been on the town’s major road, the trail that ran north and south between Springfield and Hartford. (Today it is the impressive Longmeadow Street, Route 5, a designated historic area divided by a grassy promenade and lined with old, but well-kept homes.)
It was an important road then, too. To the west, behind his house, he’d have headed down a steep cliff to the flat land along the swiftly coursing Connecticut River where he was free to explore and learn about the ways of a river as well as the flora and fauna to be found there.
Longmeadow is the place where the Connecticut River widens as it bends in a southerly direction from Springfield towards Hartford and Long Island Sound. The area has good bottomland for growing, and is mostly flat with some hills toward the east.
Every spring, children like Johnny would have witnessed the annual shad fishing in the river. The nets were spread out on the common to be mended and readied for the catch, and the fish would be distributed among the families and salted away for the winter. It was yet another way that the river was central to the life of the town.
Most of the time in the 1780s and 1790s, the river itself would have been serene except for the barges and boats and other river traffic which, to an alert and curious boy like Johnny, would clearly have signified that the river was a highway for travel and transportation -- a means of going somewhere else.
The Connecticut River was an education in itself. Johnny no doubt swam in it in summer, and learned to make crude canoes or a log raft. In spring he would have needed to steer clear of other logs floating down the river to the lumber mills at the mouth of the river on Long Island Sound, while in summer, flatboats and barges carried goods in both directions – fish and furs, and lumber. A boy with wanderlust could wish to sail with them and push back his horizons.
Johnny was certainly that boy.
When winter came, the river became a highway of ice. In very cold weather it could easily bear traffic on its way across from Boston to Albany and beyond, or sleighs full of people pulled by horses. It was a great place for a boy to skate or to look at snatches of the outside world and dream of someday going there.
If he went from his house in the other direction, to the east, he was quickly on the Way to the Woods as the path was called, and into the woodlands where he would, in later life, spend huge chunks of his time. In this area at that time he would have seen deer, moose, wolves, perhaps even bears. The trees would have been maple, birch, beech, oak and pine – especially pine.
So the outdoors was his classroom – but not his only classroom. Longmeadow, like other towns, had a one-room schoolhouse and was required to hire a schoolteacher to teach the children reading, writing, ciphering (arithmetic), penmanship and “decent behavior”.
A schoolmaster who taught in the schools of that day, was probably an itinerant young man who brought with him some books and a hickory stick as standard equipment. Children learned their ABCs from the New England Primer which had its own agenda in the form of cautionary tales for children about others who had misbehaved and told what had happened to them. The dark implication was that the same thing was in store for the reader if he did not mend his ways.
They also learned from a paddle-shaped piece of wood covered with a transparent sheet made from an animal’s horn and called a “horn book”. Beneath the horn was a reading lesson, perhaps the alphabet and on the other side might be the Lord’s Prayer. Children were expected to learn and recite these lessons, often reciting like a chorus with the rest of the grades -- who all learned under the same roof.
Johnny also learned to write quite well. His “penmanship” or writing was always quite stylish and was known as the “Boston style” with its symmetrical loops and roundness. His pen would have been a goose quill with a knife-sharpened tip dipped into a small bottle of ink. To the child who was using quills and ink, blots and blotches were frowned upon and might call down a rap upon the knuckles from that hickory stick.
One of Johnny’s half-sisters has told us that he loved to read and would read anything he could get his hands on, including borrowed books which he read rather quickly so he could get through them before returning them – like Abe Lincoln a bit later.
It’s possible that one of Johnny’s teachers may have brought an apple to school to teach about the rotation of the earth, spinning it and catching glinting rays of sunlight on its shiny surface. It may also have caught Johnny’s fancy as though the apple really were the world, and certainly was the eye-catching center of everything.
So Johnny’s education was round and sound and solid, but not of the university type. He may have had seven or eight years of Longmeadow’s best educational efforts before moving on to the working world. Johnny’s father was a farmer and carpenter, so he could have been hired out. The farming would have been a skill he could have acquired from the age of 14 when it was legal to hire him out, his wages accruing to his father. He also spent some time selling his father’s farm products as well as various herbs used for medicinal purposes. He would come to know those herbs well, a knowledge he would always carry with him.
Longmeadow, as its name implies, has large flatlands as well as woods and riverbanks. Farms were plentiful and ochards too. While apples were grown “back home” in the Nashua River Valley, Johnny perhaps learned more about raising them and caring for the trees when he was hired out to a farm where they had apple orchards. Probably Longmeadow was where he acquired that knowledge and a love for this kind of work.
Apple trees were important in Longmeadow just as they were everywhere else in the young United States of America. Governor Winthrop had brought them to America as saplings when he came to Boston in 1630. But when he arrived he found an orchard already growing on Boston Common! The first settler in Boston, William Blaxton, had planted the trees using seeds he had collected from apples he and others had eaten on the voyage from England to Weymouth, Massachusetts, where Blaxton had first landed.
Now apple trees were plentiful, even along the Connecticut River. They were easy trees to grow and the apples, as long as you kept cattle and deer away, grew quickly and had many uses. When you picked them in autumn, you could eat them as hand fruit or keep them through the winter.
But housewives often dried them and hung them in cellars until they were needed to make sauces. Others were used for apple butter, which could be used like jam. Whatever apples were not used in these ways were taken to cider mills in late autumn. Cider and cider vinegar could be used to flavor and preserve foods as well. The mills ground the apples into these liquids.
Cider fresh from the presses was refreshing and tasty, but it got even better as it started to ferment into hard cider. Cider could also be frozen. Then, when the ice was removed, it had less liquid, and the more concentrated remains became applejack, a brandy, and a more potent drink than cider. A person could get drunk from applejack if he weren’t careful – or even if he was.
So when Johnny Appleseed learned all these things at home in Longmeadow, he was preparing for his ultimate career. Not only would he bring apples to eat to the western lands, he would bring apples to drink. Apples became the American equivalent of the grape in other lands. There were no cafes or taverns in Ohio or western Pennsylvania, but when Johnny got there, alcoholic beverages would grow on trees.
Longmeadow would also have been where an impressionable young man of Johnny’s age learned what he did about God and religion. We’ve already seen that his family was open to new religious ideas and not hidebound by the dogma of the more formal sects derived from Calvinism or the Church of England.
We know that Johnny sat for much of each Sabbath looking up at his aged and famous minister, Reverend Stephen Williams. When the minister was about Johnny’s age Indians had taken him captive from his home in Deerfield upriver on the Connecticut. People remarked that Williams bore no grudge against the Indians despite their taking him from his people in his early life. Reverend Williams had lived with the Indians and learned from them. Johnny, like Williams, would have a greater understanding of Indians than most white people of his time.
SIDEBAR -- Deerfield Raid and the Longmeadow Minister
Deerfield, MA, was an outpost begun in 1704 on the Connecticut upriver from Longmeadow. It had been attacked several times by the French and their Indian allies who were trying to prevent English settlement of the region. In the pre-dawn hours of February 29, 1704 about 50 French soldiers and about 200 Indians of the area staged a raid. They burned down 17 houses, killed 48 residents and took 112 captive.
These captives were marched to Canada, but about 20 died en route. The Indians intended to ransom most of them while others would be kept to replace members of the tribe who had died.
One of the first homes attacked was that of Reverend Williams. Two of the children were killed and the rest of the family taken to Canada. Most were eventually released after negotiation, but one daughter, seven-year-old Eunice refused to go home again, even as an adult.
One of the sons, Stephen, who was ten at the time, was kept in Canada a little over a year and then brought to Boston. He attended Harvard and became a minister. He served as pastor at Longmeadow for 66 years.
During this time he served as a chaplain on three occasions on campaigns against the French and Indians. He was also wrote the only recorded eyewitness account of Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” one of the fire and brimstone speeches made during the “Great Awakening” in the Connecticut River Valley made on July 7, 1741 in Enfield, Connecticut the town next to Longmeadow to the south. Williams’s vivid account of the fiery sermon is in his diaries at the Storrs Library in Longmeadow.
The Great Awakening sent the message to the ordinary person that religions and all classes of people were equal, a novel idea to many at the time, and one unpopular to the established church.It also promoted the idea that no religious denomination had the whole truth, a disturbing idea at the time.
Williams, who listened to this sermon and took the pains to record it, served as minister to Johnny Appleseed, who himself became a liberal if lay minister. The Longmeadow of that day was not known to be a stronghold of religious liberalism, and Rev. Williams is believed to have been a skeptic rather than a follower. Conservative people were concerned that the religious revival had become a political movement that was disrupting the social status quo by encouraging ordinary people to believe that traditional roles could be challenged. The Great Awakening would not be the last religious movement in America to have this effect.
By the time Johnny reached legal age, at 21, he could keep his wages and go where he pleased. A boy who spends his days in the woods or watching the river go places he could only wonder about, develops wanderlust, and Johnny was just such a boy.
He also developed notions about where he should be heading. A curious boy, he kept his ears and eyes open. He heard stories from the travelers who passed through his river town. The post road from Springfield south to Hartford passed a short distance from the family’s door, and Johnny, traveling up and down the river bank would have seen the traffic on the Connecticut Path, crossing the river at Springfield on its way west and would have heard of the Hudson and of the Susquehanna where some of the drivers were headed.
Wagonmasters and traders, even the Boston-New York stagecoach stopped at The Old Red House Inn built by Capt. Simon Colton just south of the meetinghouse and at Ely’s Tavern on the other side of the street to the north. They would stop at those places on their way from Boston and New York, and Johnny would have understood that the Allegheny Mountains and the Indians were the only obstacles to people from New England who wanted to settle on the great land beyond.
That was an exciting time in American history. The Revolution had ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris which said that all the land east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes now belonged the fledgling American Republic. That republic would shortly have a Constitution, but even before that, and more important to Johnny and others who wanted to head west, it would have a plan for settlement west of the mountains.
Even though England had given up the land called “the Ohio Country” to America, the government wasn’t in control of it. Several Indian tribes had good reason not to agree that the land belonged to the United States.
And they weren’t the only ones. There were also states, particularly Connecticut and Virginia who still had charters given to them by the king of England that gave them all the land at their latitudes from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The Confederation Congress, which was trying to govern the post-revolution states, had very little money and few ways to raise it, so it wanted to sell the land in the Ohio Country to raise funds.
They also wanted to control settlement in this area because they were afraid those who went there might eventually form their own country since the mountains cut them off from the eastern part of the U.S. And they had war debts to pay, some of them to veterans.
They decided to do three things at the same time. They began to negotiate a treaty with the Indians and with the states, and they set up a way for different parts of the territory to become states when they had enough people. This plan eventually became the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
It forced the states who had claims in the new territory to give them up. The territory, would be administered directly by Congress, and when enough people had settled in the new area, states would be made out of it.
The legislation also banned slavery in this territory and had rules about education and civil liberties. It opened the door to quick settlement and westward expansion.
The banning of slavery was necessary because it was mostly New Englanders like John Chapman’s neighbors who wanted to move into this territory, so the law had to be made to appeal to them. The land already appealed for a simple reason – soil. Farmers in the New England states were tired of scratching out an existence in the stoney soils of the Northeast, and looked with an avid eye toward the new paradise in the long-awaited and now available Ohio territory. Johnny understood how they felt and began to develop his own plan.
To the government, giving land grants to the soldiery filled two needs. They could pay back their war debt to the veterans and bring to this Indian-infested region (their point of view) men who were used to handling firearms and acting agressively toward a foe. They would, in a way, be like a civilian standing army who could protect themselves without much government help. Or so the government thought.
SIDEBAR -The Northwest Ordinance
Some thought went into this legislation. It followed the ideas of both Hamilton and Jefferson who usually took opposite sides on issues, and it spelled out in some detail how these lands would go from territory to state.
Another unique provision was made which is often cited by originalists to prove that the founding fathers had no notions of separation of Church and State. Religious tolerance was proclaimed, and it was enunciated that since "Religion, morality, and knowledge" are "necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."
The right of habeas corpus was written into the charter, as was freedom of religious worship and bans on excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishment. Trial by jury and a ban on ex post facto laws were also rights granted. These things were, shortly afterwards written into the U.S. Constitution. The banishment of slavery had particular resonance because it had the effect of balancing free and slave states and led to an extension of the Ohio River as a boundary between these states after the Louisiana Purchase. More than that, the Northwest Ordinance gave Abraham Lincoln the basis for his free state legal philosophy.
The general hypocrisy of white American’s views and treatment of American Indians is spelled out in the Northwest Ordinance which said: "The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed."
In Ohio, several tribes refused to recognize the authority of the U.S. Goernment and banded together. Blue Jacket of the Shawnees and Little Turtle of the Miamis tried to stop white settlement in the territory. After the Indian confederation had killed more than 800 soldiers in two battles — the worst defeats ever suffered by the U.S. at the hands of Native Americans — President Washington assigned General Anthony Wayne command of a new army, which eventually defeated the confederation at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, and made the Treaty of Greenville which allowed whites to continue settling the territory.
SIDEBAR: Anthony Wayne and conflict with American Indians
Anthony Wayne was an important American military leader during and after the American Revolution. He earned the nickname "Mad" Anthony Wayne because of his impulsive actions on the battlefield.
In 1792, President George Washington appointed Wayne as the commander of the United States Army of the Northwest to defend American settlers from Indian attack. Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair had both been defeated at the hands of the Native Americans in the previous few years, and Washington hoped that Wayne would prove to be more successful. To help defend the frontier, Wayne ordered the construction of several forts, including Fort Recovery, Fort Defiance, and Fort Greene Ville. Seeing the build-up of American forces in the Northwest Territory, the local Indians became quite concerned.
During 1794, Wayne moved against the Indians, who were commanded by Blue Jacket. On August 20, 1794, the two forces met at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, It was called that because the Indians used trees that had been knocked down by a tornado as a sort of fort. Wayne's well-trained troops quickly drove off the Indians. On August 3, 1795, the Treaty of Greeneville was signed.
Representatives from the Miami Indians, the Wyandot Indians, the Shawnee Indians, the Delaware Indians, and several other tribes agreed to move to the northwestern part of what is present-day Ohio. But this didn’t mean that conflict was ended. Both sides continued to violate the treaty, and further bloodshed followed.
This was the background against which John Chapman and other New Englanders gave thought to heading west to Ohio. At the moment there was still too much tension between whites and Indians, and the British were known to be encouraging this tension. So the men of Longmeadow … and New Haven and Springfield would hold back – but not for long.
CHAPTER THREE -- ON TO PENNSYLVANIA