"During this time, all over the north-central Ohio counties that eventually shaped his legend, thriving cities and towns sprang up. The frontier had been swept away in 1812; now every acre was settled, even up into the marginal chestnut and oak groves along the ridges. Highways were everywhere, and by the time of John's last visits there were even canals and railroads. The cabins were falling into ruin or had already been replaced by up-to-date abodes of frame or brick. The real frontier - which, Frederick Jackson Turner once said, follows the hither edge of free land - had long since moved away from the cornland belt east of the Mississippi and had sent tongues of settlement far up the Missouri and the Platte into the foothills of the western mountains. The old first West, just over the Appalachians, that had been an absorbent for populations overflowing from the Atlantic coast when John Chapman paddled his pirogue down the Ohio, had grown into a political unit so powerful that it was beginning to change the meaning of democracy in America.

"People forgot, as they normally do with their heroes, that John Chapman had been no more of a fixed entity during this time than the land he lived on." (pg. 226-227)

"No particular place can adequately memorialize John Chapman, anyhow. Precisely defined spots in graveyards are for mere people, not for a man whose memory had become a working principle even before he died. Johnny Appleseed is no disconsolate ghost hanging around a forgotten burial site. He still strides up and down the St. Joseph above Fort Wayne, but now is staking out miles of parkway and trails to lead residents of a busy modern city into the open air where they may enjoy many acres of natural beauty at their front doors." (pg. 237)

"Similarly, Johnny has become the planter of all first orchards, not merely in the Middle West where the chances of his having supplied early seedlings are always good, but everywhere. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Nebraska, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Iowa, the Rocky Mountain states and the Pacific coast have all claimed his labors. In the states where he really worked, scarcely a county is now without a tree or orchard said to be his. Similarly, all varieties of apples roll in his direction. The Rambo is said to have been his favorite. The Johnathan, the Chapman, the Baldwin, the Grimes Golden, the Ben Davis, and others have all been attributed to seedlings planted by him. It does not matter that not one of them can be traced authoritatively to his labors. In a sense he originated all new apples. He stands for everything good and progressive in American horticulture. Nurserymen now invoke the blessings of the Johnny Appleseed moon on their spring plantings and sing his praise during the fall harvest. He is the patron saint of the American orchards." (pg. 252-253)

From Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth by Robert Price.