Johnny Appleseed was a real person.

Drawing of Johnny Appleseed, 1862

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.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Johnny Appleseed's apples were mostly grown for hard cider.

Among the seedier elements of Johnny Appleseed's story that were whitewashed for general audiences is the fact that his crops were primarily grown for alcoholic cider instead of eating. This was partly due to the biological nature of apple seeds: Many trees grown from seedlings will produce inedible apples, as opposed to the juicy varieties we enjoy today that spring from the horticultural process of grafting. There were also nutritional benefits to drinking cider, as sanitary drinking water was often absent from frontier life. However, even in Appleseed's heyday there was a temperance movement afoot that sought to dissuade farmers from turning their wares into alcoholic cider. Not surprisingly, this pressure worked to only limited effect, and yet the widespread hard cider craze perpetuated by Appleseed's dealings fizzled out in the years after his death, as the combination of a vanishing frontier and the influx of German immigrants helped point drinking-inclined Americans toward beer instead.