Johnny Appleseed was a real person.
According to legend, Johnny Appleseed wandered the Midwestern frontier in the 1800s with a tin pot on his head and nothing on his feet, scattering apple seeds from a sack and winning over settlers and Indigenous peoples alike with his joie de vivre. It all sounds too far-fetched to be real, but unlike Paul Bunyan — another celebrated frontiersman said to have wielded his axe in a similar time and place — Johnny Appleseed’s legend is rooted in truth.
Though there are few established facts from his lifetime, historians believe Johnny Appleseed was born John Chapman in Massachusetts a few months before the opening shots of the American Revolution, and he relocated to Western Pennsylvania in the 1790s. By the early 1800s, he was living a nomadic life throughout Ohio that consisted of planting nurseries, trading seeds and saplings with settlers, and preaching the word of the New Church, a Christian denomination inspired by the writings of Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg.
Along the way, he picked up his famous nickname, while making an impression on communities with his alleged refusal to harm other living creatures and his strange garb; witnesses claimed he wore a cloth sack with holes cut out for his arms and head. After moving into Indiana in the 1830s, Chapman died from what was most likely pneumonia around Fort Wayne in 1845.
The combination of the unusual lifestyle and clear eccentricities made Chapman’s story ripe for exaggeration. W.D. Haley’s article “Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero” in the November 1871 edition of Harper’s Monthly Magazine championed him as a kinder and gentler frontiersman who easily bridged the worlds of the Natives and settlers, while poems such as Lydia Maria Child’s “Apple-Seed John” from 1881 painted its subject as a saintly figure who walked the earth solely to grow food for the good of humankind. By the time Disney included a segment on Johnny Appleseed in 1948’s Melody Time, the image of the barefoot, tin pot-hatted do-gooder was here to stay.