"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 The cabins were falling into ruin or had already been replaced by up-to-date abodes of frame or brick.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.
Showing posts with label Price. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Price. Show all posts
3/08/2011
1/31/2011
1/16/2011
“About the time of the survey of the lands in the United States military district, northwest of the river Ohio, preparatory to their location by those holding the warrants which had been issued by the government to the soldiers of the revolutionary war, for services during that war, there came to the valley of the Muskingum and its tributaries, the Tuscarawas, Walhonding, Mohican, &c., a man whose real name, if ever known, is not now remembered by the oldest inhabitants here, but who was commonly known and called all over the country by the name of Johnny Appleseed. [...]
“Immediately upon his advent, he commenced the raising of apple trees from the seed, at a time when there were not, perhaps fifty white men within the forty miles square. He would clear a few rods of ground in some open part of the forest, girdle the trees standing upon it, surround it with a brush fence, and plant his apple seeds. This done, he would go off some twenty miles or so, select another favorable spot, and again go through the same operation. In this way, without family and without connection, he rambled from place to place, and employed his time, I may say his life.
“When the settlers began to flock in and open their ‘clearings’, old Appleseed was ready for them with his young trees; and it was not his fault if everyone of them had not an orchard planted out and growing without delay.”
Hovey’s Magazine of Horticulture, April 1846
“The urgent need of the frontiersman for apples is something that the twentieth century can easily overlook. […] It is hard to realize that in the pioneer history of most American communities the first apple crop once marked a first stage of permanency. No other fruit could be started so easily, and none could be put to so many essential uses.” (pg. 39)
“Every settler, therefore, hoped to have a goodly plot of appletrees set out and bearing in the shortest stretch of time. Often, the trees were even a legal prerequisite to a claim, as in Kentucky’s ‘Sapphire Country’ where the planting of appleseeds or peachstones was a common guarantee to warrant the establishment of a title. At Marietta, when the Ohio Company in 1792 set up the ‘Donation Tract’ to encourage migrations to the backlands up the Muskingum and Duck Creek, they stipulated specifically that to acquire a hundred acres a settler put out not less than fifty appletrees and twenty peachtrees within three years. When orchards had been established, the land had been mastered.” (pg. 40)
“But it was seedling stock that started the pioneer apple orchards across America. Not that grafting and budding were unknown. These arts were already highly developed in the 1790’s. But the transporting of such stock into new country was a difficult and expensive venture. When trips from Connecticut to Ohio often took many weeks, a considerable number of young grafted appletrees would have pre-empted precious baggage space needed for family essentials, and would have demanded a constant vigil to keep the tender roots moist and alive.” (pg. 41)
“A few seedlings in every lot were bound by the law of chance to be fairly good, and some would be superior. Sooner or later a Northern Spy would appear in New York, a Grimes Golden in West Virginia, and a Stark in Ohio.” (pg. 42)
“In time, apples would even pioneer in a broader commerce, for apple brandy from the trees that spread over the Ohio Valley’s hillsides in the first wave of settlement would be one of the first important inland products to be shipped down the Mississippi to the markets of New Orleans.” (pg. 40)
All from Robert Price's 1954 book Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth.
“Immediately upon his advent, he commenced the raising of apple trees from the seed, at a time when there were not, perhaps fifty white men within the forty miles square. He would clear a few rods of ground in some open part of the forest, girdle the trees standing upon it, surround it with a brush fence, and plant his apple seeds. This done, he would go off some twenty miles or so, select another favorable spot, and again go through the same operation. In this way, without family and without connection, he rambled from place to place, and employed his time, I may say his life.
“When the settlers began to flock in and open their ‘clearings’, old Appleseed was ready for them with his young trees; and it was not his fault if everyone of them had not an orchard planted out and growing without delay.”
Hovey’s Magazine of Horticulture, April 1846
“The urgent need of the frontiersman for apples is something that the twentieth century can easily overlook. […] It is hard to realize that in the pioneer history of most American communities the first apple crop once marked a first stage of permanency. No other fruit could be started so easily, and none could be put to so many essential uses.” (pg. 39)
“Every settler, therefore, hoped to have a goodly plot of appletrees set out and bearing in the shortest stretch of time. Often, the trees were even a legal prerequisite to a claim, as in Kentucky’s ‘Sapphire Country’ where the planting of appleseeds or peachstones was a common guarantee to warrant the establishment of a title. At Marietta, when the Ohio Company in 1792 set up the ‘Donation Tract’ to encourage migrations to the backlands up the Muskingum and Duck Creek, they stipulated specifically that to acquire a hundred acres a settler put out not less than fifty appletrees and twenty peachtrees within three years. When orchards had been established, the land had been mastered.” (pg. 40)
“But it was seedling stock that started the pioneer apple orchards across America. Not that grafting and budding were unknown. These arts were already highly developed in the 1790’s. But the transporting of such stock into new country was a difficult and expensive venture. When trips from Connecticut to Ohio often took many weeks, a considerable number of young grafted appletrees would have pre-empted precious baggage space needed for family essentials, and would have demanded a constant vigil to keep the tender roots moist and alive.” (pg. 41)
“A few seedlings in every lot were bound by the law of chance to be fairly good, and some would be superior. Sooner or later a Northern Spy would appear in New York, a Grimes Golden in West Virginia, and a Stark in Ohio.” (pg. 42)
“In time, apples would even pioneer in a broader commerce, for apple brandy from the trees that spread over the Ohio Valley’s hillsides in the first wave of settlement would be one of the first important inland products to be shipped down the Mississippi to the markets of New Orleans.” (pg. 40)
All from Robert Price's 1954 book Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth.
1/01/2011
"If John Chapman, when he died near Fort Wayne in 1845, had merely lain down to the long rest like ordinary men, then the history of his labors – though remarkable – could have been told quickly and simply, for the old Yankee tree peddler had taken little care to leave himself in the records.
"Instead, because even in his dying John could not be commonplace, he stepped spryly out of the flesh that snowy March day, straightened his mushpot hat, girt up his coffee-sack shirt, eased his bare feet in celestial sunshine and started off to longer travels and greater labors than he had ever known before. He had walked more miles than any other recorded borderer of his generation – now he belonged to the American trails and rivers forever. He had strewn appleseeds over much of the land between the Allegheny and the Mississippi – now he would become the mythical planter of all the first orchards from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And when American horticulture had been well established, he would turn his hand, during the next hundred years, to anything else that would make the land fruitful and beautiful.
"He had been a hero on the Indian border and a kindly, humanitarian Christian missionary who left folk talk like his seeds growing wherever he had gone. In the Middle Western wilderness, he had helped make straight the paths for the march of American democracy. Now that these paths had overlaced a continent, he would become a symbol of a nation's philosophy setting an example of faith and industry and common neighborliness among all races and levels of men and –to use Vachel Lindsay's metaphore – even conjure an apple barrel out of the sun from which the Rambos and Baldwins of democracy might go rolling around the world." (xii-xiii)
From Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth by Robert Price.
"Instead, because even in his dying John could not be commonplace, he stepped spryly out of the flesh that snowy March day, straightened his mushpot hat, girt up his coffee-sack shirt, eased his bare feet in celestial sunshine and started off to longer travels and greater labors than he had ever known before. He had walked more miles than any other recorded borderer of his generation – now he belonged to the American trails and rivers forever. He had strewn appleseeds over much of the land between the Allegheny and the Mississippi – now he would become the mythical planter of all the first orchards from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And when American horticulture had been well established, he would turn his hand, during the next hundred years, to anything else that would make the land fruitful and beautiful.
"He had been a hero on the Indian border and a kindly, humanitarian Christian missionary who left folk talk like his seeds growing wherever he had gone. In the Middle Western wilderness, he had helped make straight the paths for the march of American democracy. Now that these paths had overlaced a continent, he would become a symbol of a nation's philosophy setting an example of faith and industry and common neighborliness among all races and levels of men and –to use Vachel Lindsay's metaphore – even conjure an apple barrel out of the sun from which the Rambos and Baldwins of democracy might go rolling around the world." (xii-xiii)
From Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth by Robert Price.
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