Food, Cider, and Mobility: The Story of Johnny Appleseed

It’s apple season here at Oak Spring and as we remember American folk hero Johnny Appleseed, we are surrounded with a crop of our own. Apple trees featured prominently in Bunny Mellon’s garden designs; from the espalier of the main garden to the orchards dotting the hills around the main house, Malus pumila helps define Oak Spring.  

Apples grow from the espalier in the formal garden.

From school lunches to colloquial proverbs (“an apple a day keeps the doctor away”), apples seem almost ubiquitously American. Many Americans grow up with the fruit featuring prominently in our diets or, at the very least, in the images we see around us everyday. But the apple’s origins lie far away, all the way in the mountains of Kazakhstan. There still lives the ancestor of the fruit around us here, a wild crab apple called Malus sieversii. These wild fruit trees produce exceptionally variable fruit. In fact, the only way to reproduce a delicious, edible crop is to graft branches from one tree to another, or to take a branch off of one apple tree and to anchor that branch into a cut made in another tree. While grafting reproduces the apple varieties that people eat every day, planting the seeds themselves is a gamble. The offspring tree could have edible fruit, or inedible–but either way the new apples will be different from the old.

Golden delicious apples harvested from Oak Spring this September. A sweet eating apple, this variety is typically ready to pick earlier than others that grow in Oak Spring’s orchards.

Apples travelled out of Kazakhstan and into Western Europe via the Silk Road, the cross-Eurasian trade route that for centuries moved ideas and goods between Asia and Europe. As the fruit moved West, it became associated with conceptions of civilization and prosperity, even becoming part of Greek mythology and other belief systems. Rulers from King Darius of Persia to Alexander the Great of Macedonia spread apple trees throughout their empires, a trend that became even more widespread with the rise of the Romans. At the height of the Roman Empire, apples dotted the landscape throughout Europe. By the time England, Spain, and other countries had begun the colonization of the Americas, the apple was a staple fruit in many diets. Colonists brought apple trees with them across the Atlantic, planting orchards as far south as Chile and north, along the North American east coast. 

But there was a catch: the sweet, edible apple varieties cultivated over hundreds of years in Europe fared badly in the New World. Instead of grafting edible branches onto other trees, the only way of ensuring edible apples, the colonists had to grow the fruit from seed. The resulting apples were largely inedible – but perfect for cider. Suddenly, cider became an essential part of life for American colonists, with most farms along what was then the “frontier” hosting their own apple orchards. 

Apple cider-making at Oak Spring in 2019.

Here is where John Chapman, the man we know as Johnny Appleseed, appears in the story of Malus pumila. Land companies would provide settlers with farmland, as long as the settlers proved that they were permanent homesteaders by planting a certain number of apples and peaches. But planting an orchard is hard work. Chapman realized that he could make money by planting apple trees for farmers before they had arrived and then sell the plants and the accompanying land to the newly arrived settlers. In this way, he moved throughout what is now considered the Midwest, planting cider orchards and selling them to homesteaders. Chapman provided both cider and land acquisitions to people on the American frontier, only a slight alteration to the folk tales of the apple-planting wanderer. 

While in the early 1800s most of the apples in North America were meant for cider, people had increasingly begun to cultivate edible varieties - made possible, in part, by Chapman’s and other settlers’ popularization of propagation by seed, which allowed for the development of more diverse and hardier varieties than grafting alone. This cultivation led to an enormous diversity of apple names, shapes, colors and flavors. By 1905, the United States Department of Agriculture recorded over 17,000 different apple names throughout the country. This diversity of names apple does not exactly denote an equivalently spectacular diversity of apple varieties, although apples did have a huge diversity of forms, color and tastes at the time–probably around 14,000, in fact. This repeating nomenclature for the different cultivars frustrated botanists such as William Coxe and Robert Manning. Coxe’s A View of the Cultivation of Fruit Trees and Manning’s Book of Fruits quickly became used as standard nomenclature, with Manning’s book ultimately surpassing Coxe’s in popularity. Editions of both of these books are in the Oak Spring Garden Library, along with other works depicting the early diversity of apple varieties in the United States. 

The legacy of those early pomologists appears in the form of the apples hanging from trees around the site. Oak Spring’s orchards include Winesap, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Arkansas Black, and York apple trees, some of which are close to 80 years old. Last year, around 800 pounds of the harvested apples were made into apple butter, and we’re looking forward to another bountiful harvest of the historic fruit this season.

Banner image by Roger Foley.