Chapter Seven
John Chapman, 1774–1845
FIVE MILES WEST of my place lies the site where the native village called Greentown stood overlooking the Black Fork River. I knew the location was close but did not know exactly where until the local Johnny Appleseed Memorial Society placed a sign on Route 39 two miles north of Perrysville. One October day in 2006, I parked my truck in front of an old barn and followed a tractor path westward through farmland and woods to the river. My interest lay in the historical significance of the place but also in the character of John Chapman, popularly known as Johnny Appleseed, whom I had read about and knew to be much more interesting than the cartoon character that popular culture has made of him. He had lived for a while in the territory that became Jefferson County, where I grew up, later migrating to Licking County, where I also lived, and then north to what is now Ashland County, my current home. In a way, I followed his footsteps.
The Memorial Society’s sign explains that instability among the native people resulted from military expeditions into the area after the Revolutionary War. Some Delaware and Mingo joined many Shawnee who moved as early as 1788 to the place named Greentown for Thomas Green of Connecticut, a Tory who migrated westward and lived among the Shawnee. John Chapman, local preacher James Copus, the Shawnee chief called the Prophet, and a Delaware leader called Captain Pipe frequently visited the settlement, which by 1812 included more than 150 dwellings.
In 2013 the Johnny Appleseed Memorial Society bought the land on which Greentown stood and created a theme park with a log house (built in imitation of Shawnee lodges) and wooded trails leading to sites where the native people cooked and boiled sugar maple syrup. Years earlier, in the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District of Ashland County, about two miles south of the village of Mifflin, a group called the Johnny Appleseed Heritage Center Inc., headed by a local man named William Smith, had built an outdoor drama park on 118 acres of “managed” forest. Smith also built on the property a naturally contoured amphitheater with a seating capacity of sixteen hundred; an indoor auditorium; an interactive, handicapped-accessible museum; and a learning center. The project received both public and private funds from, among others, the J. M. Smucker Company in nearby Orrville (which makes jams and jellies) and the Ohio Arts and Sports Facilities Commission. The entire complex, opened in 2004, hosted an annual festival and presented living history reenactments similar to those at Schoenbrunn Village near New Philadelphia in Tuscarawas County. Due to financial difficulties, the performances were discontinued after 2006.
Let me state here that this will not be a diatribe against historical theme parks or the effort to create popular history from fragments of a romanticized past. I rejoice at the conservation of 118 wooded acres, which may become old-growth forest. My few objections to outdoor drama and theme parks stem from their oversimplification and often sanguine revisionism, yet ultimately they may inform and spark curiosity.
Given the contemporary appetite for outdoor drama and historical theme parks, I wonder that this one arrives on the scene so recently. Johnny Appleseed embodied one of the enduring myths of the Northwest Territories, and he has been, like Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett, and Kit Carson, transformed by popular culture into a mythic frontiersman who helped bring civilization to the wilderness. Popularization, of course, eliminates the failures, frustrations, and inconsistencies of a life—in short, what makes it interesting. Like the others mentioned, John Chapman led a life far more complex than that created by the entertainment industry.
The man who came to be known as Appleseed John was born in Leominster, Worcester County, Massachusetts, on September 26, 1774, the second child and eldest son of Nathaniel Chapman, a minuteman of Leominster during the Revolutionary War, and Elizabeth Simonds Chapman. After Elizabeth’s death in 1776, Nathaniel married Lucy Cooley of Connecticut Valley. They lived at Longmeadow and raised ten more children, five girls and five boys. We know a surprising amount of detail about John Chapman due to biographies such as Robert Price’s Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth (1967), Henry A. Pershing’s Johnny Appleseed and His Time: An Historical Romance (1930), and Newell Dwight Hillis, The Quest of John Chapman: The Story of a Forgotten Hero (1904).
Michael Pollan, in The Botany of Desire (2001), advances the hypothesis that Chapman primarily contributed not apples but wine to the frontier. Chapman grew trees from seed, not grafting; since apples grown from seed are not good for eating but rather for cidering, and since preservation in those days meant fermentation, Chapman grew apples to be used for wine making. He represents for Pollan a frontier Dionysus. Hugh Nissenson makes Chapman a secondary character in The Tree of Life (1983), a frontier novel that examines the intersection of religious faith and savagery and probes the psychology of those professing a religion of love while committing atrocities for the purpose of acquiring land. Nissenson makes Chapman a disaffected son who hates his itinerant father, a thief and proud Revolutionary War veteran who lovingly cleans his gun every Sunday but fails to provide for his children. Grown to manhood, Chapman leaves Massachusetts to escape him. Price, on the other hand, indicates that Chapman kept in touch with his family members, who moved westward to what is now Marietta, Ohio, to join him. Pershing proposes that Chapman spent the years 1787–88 as a missionary with minister Ave Buckles in the Potomac area in Virginia. He also attributes Chapman’s emigration westward to a disappointed love affair with a woman named Sarah Crawford who moved with her family to the Ohio country. Hillis identifies the unattainable lady as Dorothy Durand, while Price corroborates neither liaison.
What seems clear is that by the age of twenty-three Chapman had arrived in western Pennsylvania, the scene of land feuds and Indian retaliations, that he had built a cabin near Pittsburgh in 1792, and that by 1797, at twenty-nine, he had sold it and gone to Ohio. “Settlement” in those days involved clearing two acres of every hundred-acre parcel and building a house. Although land was granted to war veterans in lieu of payment for services, such deeds were subject to claim jumping and fraud. Then, as now, laws helped to make big speculators wealthy while giving inadequate protection to small farmers whose land was often taken by concerns such as the Holland Land Company and the Ohio Company. The successful land speculator was often ambitious and ruthless when it came to exploiting people who had little ready cash. When powerful interests of one group, however, take the land and livelihood of the less powerful, the latter often turn not on their oppressors but on some other dispossessed or disadvantaged group. In 1797 the dispossessed white settlers looked toward the land held by native dwellers.
Among those embittered victims of land speculation, John Chapman headed westward, taking with him the craft of nurseryman, which he learned in Pennsylvania. He was not the first: Ebenezer Zane, who was to found Zanesville in 1799, had planted an orchard on Wheeling Island. In search of cheap land, Chapman entered the Ohio country at George’s Run, four miles south of what is now Steubenville, and planted orchards there as well as at Zanesville, Newark, the Licking River area, Muskingum watershed, Coshocton, Mount Vernon, Mansfield, and Ashland (then called Uniontown) as he headed north and west.
Chapman was slender, about five feet nine inches tall, with long black hair, a beard, and piercing blue eyes that, legend has it, captivated people. In winter he donned a full-length Quaker coat and felt hat. He wore cast-off clothing, an ankle-length collarless coat of tow linen, straight sleeves inserted into armholes, and usually no shoes. While this type of dress was not uncommon for frontiersmen, by 1818 people had begun to comment on his raggedness and eccentricity. The commonly reproduced figure, and the only one extant, of Chapman as a tall, thin, unkempt man with kind eyes was drawn by a student at Oberlin College who allegedly saw John Chapman in his older days. No other portrait has been found. Chapman’s legend includes his respect for all life to the extent that he would not molest a rattlesnake and or chase a sow bear from a hollow log that would have afforded shelter on a winter night. His actions, however, seem less reverent than commonsensical: surely no right-thinking person would molest a rattlesnake, and sow bear are said to be among the most ferociously protective mothers.
The legend further describes an itinerant man moving among his orchards and accepting hospitality from settlers in return for apple seeds and seedlings. He was not itinerant, however: he owned land near George’s Run; in Belmont County near the head of Big Stillwater Creek; in Wellsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia); and in Licking County, Ohio, on Scotland Farm, three miles north of Newark. He also owned town lots in Mount Vernon. Toward the end of his life, Price suggests, Chapman may himself have become a land speculator.
Price describes other colorful and eccentric characters of the frontier, such as James Craig, a hard-drinking settler who fought a landowner named Joseph Walker near Mount Vernon. Known today as “Ohio’s Colonial Town” because of its well-maintained Victorian houses and picturesque center, and home of the conservative Nazarene College, Mount Vernon was at the end of the eighteenth century an unruly settlement. Newark was even more notorious. Frontier people, young at the time of the Revolution and pinning their hopes on a new Eden in the wilderness, endured severe winters and malarial summers; hardened by frontier life and embittered by losing their land to speculators and their families to retaliations by indigenous people, they skinned wolves alive, cleaned out viper nests and flung the carcasses onto mounds, drank corn whiskey, and amused themselves by witnessing public whippings. John Chapman, who seems to have had some refinement, referred to Newark as “hell.”
Six miles westward, the village of Granville had a different evolution. When I lived there from 1986 to 1993, I attended many of the community festivals; every one included amateur historians telling stories, playing mountain dulcimers, and singing about the days of the original settlers who emigrated from Granville, Massachusetts, in a group that included a mayor, town planner, engineer, blacksmith, and minister as well as craftsmen. A temperance community, its people learned the value of minding their own business: when one of them went to Newark to preach against drinking, he was hanged in the street. Even today these two towns retain the flavor of their origins. Granville, a quiet residential village with a strong sense of its own history, boasts stately Victorian houses, old trees, wide central boulevard, public gardens, historic cemetery, strict building codes, regular community festivals at holidays and sugar-maple time, bicycle trail, restrictions on alcohol sales, and the prestigious Denison University located on a hill above the town with a white steeple lit up at night (which students refer to as the “nipple of knowledge”). Newark, on the other hand, now a small industrial city transected by I-70 and affected by urban sprawl and crime, retains its raw image.
Writers on Chapman’s life all testify to the grim brutality of the frontier. Using details from Price’s biography of Chapman, Nissenson graphically portrays the scalpings, slow torture, and live burnings committed by both settlers and pre-settlement people. He describes a technique documented at the time and repeated in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans of sticking blazing pine needles into human flesh. Reprisals occurred frequently: for example, men named McCullogh and Morrison hunted down native dwellers in revenge for the death of missionary Adam Payne, with no evidence of who his killers were. George Carpenter murdered Indians, even those who had been converted by Moravian missionaries, and met his own death when, during a nightmare, he leaped into a kettle of boiling maple-sugar water.
Native Americans fared worst of all. Decimated by disease brought by seventeenth-century French explorers, their numbers steadily decreased in the Ohio country in the late eighteenth century. Those who remained included Shawnee to the central and northern parts of the territory and Delaware, or Lenni-Lenape (“the original people”), to the east. Gen. George Rogers Clark led an army against the Shawnee and Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne against a coalition of nations at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on the Maumee River in 1794. The Treaty of 1795 followed, after which many Native Americans moved north and west. Cornstalk, a Shawnee chief, tried to convince young warriors that they would never defeat the whites. He was nevertheless imprisoned by settlers and assassinated for killing a man named Gilmore, even though he was innocent of the crime. Other Shawnee placed no faith in the treaties of white men. Tecumseh and the Prophet, both Shawnee chiefs, refused to sign and continued to lead war parties against settlers. The Prophet’s followers were defeated at Tippecanoe in 1811, and, after allying large numbers of mostly Shawnee and Creek from all over the eastern part of the continent, Tecumseh was killed in the Battle of the Thames in Ontario in 1813.
Not all settlers believed in exterminating or deporting the native dwellers. John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary in Pennsylvania and later in Ohio, wrote of the generous spirit and quality of life of the Delaware and Shawnee. Chiefs ruled by wise council and reason, he recorded. Parents never scolded or punished children. They possessed no ambition to acquire more than their neighbors or more than they needed. Their varied diet included game, fruit, nuts, vegetables, corn, and fish.
Hostilities raged in 1812, brought on in part by new hope of an alliance between the Shawnee and the British against the Americans. Reverend James Copus, hoping to avert trouble between settlers and indigenous people, urged the inhabitants of Greentown to move to the Mansfield area, having received assurances from white authorities that Shawnee property would be respected. As soon as the Indians departed in August 1812, however, white settlers invaded Greentown, urinated on the floor of the council house, and burned all lodges and possessions. Price includes the detail of the white men using an Indian scalp from which to drink a mixture of blood and whiskey. Reverend Copus, who had been innocent of the whites’ intentions, was murdered for misinforming the Shawnee. Settlers made a sweep of the area, killing all Shawnee who remained, although the Copus family’s murderers were never precisely identified.
These atrocities provoked Delaware and Shawnee retaliation in a series of raids. The so-called Panic of September 1812 resulted in the settlers of Ashland and Richland Counties abandoning their homes and gathering in the Mansfield blockhouse for safety. John Chapman made journeys over several nights to warn them of expected Shawnee retaliation. As things turned out, most of the evacuations were unnecessary, but on August 10, 1813, a storekeeper named Levi Jones was attacked and killed just north of Mansfield. Once again, fearing continued attacks, settlers gathered into two Mansfield blockhouses. John Chapman volunteered to go to Mount Vernon, about twenty-eight miles away, to notify soldiers and bring reinforcements. No one is sure whether he walked and ran the distance barefoot as legend has it or whether he rode a horse.
Chapman’s actions in warning the settlers indicate his loyalty to them, but it is clear that he also lived among the Shawnee who regarded him as a medicine man who could cure blindness. Pershing states that the Shawnee believed him to be possessed by a sacred spirit. Nissenson portrays him as a friend to a young Shawnee warrior who had been unable to communicate with the spirits as was required of him. In the novel, Chapman tells the young warrior to “make God pity [him]” by subjecting himself to inhuman privations. As a result, the Shawnee is visited by the most militant of the spirits and goes on the warpath against all whites except John Chapman. Whatever the literal truth, it is clear that Chapman traveled safely among the Shawnee.
Chapman’s spirituality, however, involved more than the Shawnee interpretation of his medicine or the settlers’ thinking of him as eccentric. The generation that followed the middle border demonstrated an eagerness for religion in many forms. In the Ohio Valley in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many religious groups had already arrived, including Methodists, Moravians, Calvinists, and Unitarians. Settlers near Steubenville are said to have practiced witchcraft. Revivalism, characterized by literalism and emotional demonstrativeness, provided escape from the grimness of pioneer life. John Chapman brought Swedenborgianism, a mystic philosophy neither demonstrative nor simple.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), a Swedish geologist, came to believe that God had revealed to him alone the true doctrine of Christianity. He set forth his “Teachings of the New Church” in 1757, when he believed that Christ had come again to earth. Swedenborg describes in his many religious tracts his visitations by angels and his visions of heaven. Although he had not intended to found a new church, his followers initiated the Church of the New Jerusalem after his death.
Swedenborgian mystical philosophy involves the belief in correspondences between this world and the spiritual one. Neoplatonic in its dualism of nature and spirit, Swedenborgianism insists that human beings lived at once in the natural and spiritual worlds. The true significance of the scriptures, Swedenborg taught, can be understood by human beings only through the “correspondences” between these two worlds:
The whole world corresponds to the spiritual world, not only collectively, but in every part; and therefore, whatever exists in the natural world from the spiritual, is said to be the correspondent of that from which it exists; … Since man is a heaven, and also a world, in least form after the image of the greatest, therefore in him there is a spiritual world and a natural world. The interiors, which are of his mind, and have reference to understanding and will, constitute his spiritual world; but the exteriors, which are of his body, and have reference to his senses and actions, constitute his natural world.
Swedenborg’s doctrine, similar to Platonic philosophy, teaches that what human beings perceive in the visible, or material, world has a correspondence in the invisible, or spiritual, world and postulates the interdependence of heaven and earth. Not only does he avow the necessity of the heavenly to the earthly, as most Christians would; he also and just as firmly avows the necessity of earth for heaven, declaring that the divine is visible in the here and now, in the physical nature of things. While many Christians argue that the material world, whether human-created or natural, can lead human beings away from the spiritual, Swedenborg’s insistence on the physical world as essential to the very existence of the spiritual and his descriptions of angels that possess human, not divine, form reveal in certain passages a fascination with the body. He advances the iconoclastic notion that man can be fit for heaven only by means of the world, leading to a belief in the holiness of the physical world unacceptable to many Christians, especially those who insist on the notion of earthly depravity and physical life as a punishment to be endured in hopes of heaven.
John Chapman certainly studied Swedenborg’s writings. One Swedenborgian circle in Manchester, England, published an article on January 14, 1817, that described him spreading the word in the wilderness. A letter surviving from William Schlatter of Philadelphia to John Chapman discusses their previous correspondence, commencing in 1815, about their faith. Chapman seems to have lived a double life among humane, literary Swedenborgians and tough, often illiterate frontier people. The notion that people reap what they sow and are known by their fruits may describe Chapman’s beliefs. The people of the frontier may have been particularly receptive to the idea that the earth is necessary to the spiritual world since settlers’ close relationship to the earth made them conscious of their dependence on it. A nurseryman had to know about seasonal variation, soil quality, and availability of water. It is not clear whether Chapman’s husbandry preceded his philosophy or vice versa. Perhaps this grower’s faith in nature and the Swedenborgian concept that trees correspond to perception of and knowledge of good and truth led Chapman to embrace the philosophy. Louis Bromfield writes in Pleasant Valley that Chapman’s Swedenborgian doctrine “changed imperceptibly into a kind of pagan faith which ascribed spirits to trees and sticks and stones and regarded the animals and the birds as his friends.” Love of the physical world and belief that everything in it is holy resembles the Shawnee and Delaware belief that the world contained sacred places, that a person could not comprehend sacredness until he or she entered the place, that larks heard human prayer, that thrushes bore the spirits of those long dead, and that certain bodies of water such as lakes and streams contained transforming powers.
Like Chapman and the Swedenborgians, I am convinced that we live at once in the physical and spiritual, and furthermore that the spiritual depends on the physical and cannot exist separately. As I walked between rows of corn and into the woods in the area where Greentown had been, I hoped to feel the presence of ancient inhabitants. The wide grassy path dipped as it entered the trees, beginning to turn gold and red, before climbing a hill into a clearing; the settlement must have extended far down the hillside toward the river in order to have accommodated 150 dwellings. As I stood watching, two white-tailed does stepped from the woods to the north, paused, took the measure of my stillness, and faded into the rows of corn far down the slope. Small white cumulus clouds had begun to build up from the west. I wanted no further visions than the fiery autumn trees above corn waiting to be harvested beneath an ever-changing cloud cover, no further miracles than the seasons.
Chapman can be understood only as a complex personality at once bitter and hopeful, cynical and altruistic, frustrated and determined. He possessed strong desire and energy as well as wanderlust. Unable to settle down anywhere, he kept moving northwest, dying near Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1845 at the age of seventy-one. Having no permanent home, he was better able to be at home everywhere. The facts of this fascinating, enigmatic man’s life challenge the simplistic icon still being represented of John Chapman as a comical, kindly missionary—a cliché supported more by propaganda than historical evidence. The woods around the Greentown memorial and the heritage center may mature into old-growth forest, which will stand more fittingly than any outdoor drama or theme park for the heritage of John Chapman.