![]() Starting in 1792, the Ohio Company of Associates made a deal with potential settlers: anyone willing to form a permanent homestead on the wilderness beyond Ohio's first permanent settlement would be granted 100 acres of land. At the turn of the 19th century, speculators and private companies were buying up huge swathes of land in the Northwest Territory, waiting for settlers to arrive. Much of his early years have been lost to history, but in the early 1800s, Chapman reappears, this time on the western edge of Pennsylvania, near the country's rapidly expanding Western frontier. It was into this apple-laden world that John Chapman was born, on September 26, 1774, in Leominster, Massachusetts. "In rural areas cider took the place of not only wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water." ![]() "Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider," writes Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire. The apples that Chapman brought to the frontier were completely distinct from the apples available at any modern grocery store or farmers' market, and they weren't primarily used for eating-they were used to make America's beverage-of-choice at the time, hard apple cider. But this contemporary notion is flawed, tainted by our modern perception of the apple as a sweet, edible fruit. Today, Chapman is known by another name-Johnny Appleseed-and his story has been imbued with the saccharine tint of a fairytale. If we think of Johnny Appleseed as a barefoot wanderer whose apples were uniform, crimson orbs, it's thanks in large part to the popularity a segment of the 1948 Disney feature, Melody Time, which depicts Johnny Appleseed in Cinderella fashion, surrounded by blue songbirds and a jolly guardian angel. On a family farm in Nova, Ohio, grows a very special apple tree by some claims, the 175 year old tree is the last physical evidence of John Chapman, a prolific nurseryman who, throughout the early 1800s, planted acres upon acres of apple orchards along America's western frontier, which at the time was anything on the other side of Pennsylvania.
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