Teaching Johnny Appleseed

A young neighbor and I were discussing our late summer turn into fall where we live in the Catskills. Early color on the trees, an early change to fall coats on the deer, and an abundance of apples, among other things. “The old timers are saying this is the best apple crop they’ve seen in ages,” he told me. The Times Union Hudson Valley Bureau reports “…farmers are predicting the best apple harvest in decades.”  One estimate predicts a harvest of 31 million bushels.  In our rural neighborhood, my wife and I have been able to take advantage of local windfall apples and those still hanging to ripen on roadside trees.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how many events in our history have a corollary story involving psychoactive substances. From Prohibition to Prince; from the Whiskey Rebellion to Woodstock, just to cite a few. An abundant history discussed little and taught even less. The abundance of apples reminded me of Johnny Appleseed. 

 

For starters, Johnny was a real person, not a folklore creation like Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyon, though much about him has been romanticized and exaggerated to legendary status. His real name was John Chapman.  Chapman worked as a nurseryman in the late 1700s on what was then the Western frontier from Pennsylvania into Ohio and Indiana. A 2014 article by Natasha Geiling in Smithsonian Magazine tells us:

“John Chapman was born, on September 26, 1774, in Leominster, Massachusetts. 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. 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. 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. To prove their homesteads to be permanent, settlers were required to plant 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees in three years, since an average apple tree took roughly ten years to bear fruit. 

“Ever the savvy businessman, Chapman realized that if he could do the difficult work of planting these orchards, he could turn them around for profit to incoming frontiersmen. Wandering from Pennsylvania to Illinois, Chapman would advance just ahead of settlers, cultivating orchards that he would sell them when they arrived, and then head to more undeveloped land. Like the caricature that has survived to modern day, Chapman really did tote a bag full of apple seeds. As a member of the Swedenborgian Church, whose belief system explicitly forbade grafting (which they believed caused plants to suffer), Chapman planted all of his orchards from seed, meaning his apples were, for the most part, unfit for eating.”

The apples Chapman planted were used for making hard cider, a popular and even necessary beverage at the time. 

 "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. "In rural areas, cider took the place of not only wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water."

With some basis in fact, Americans believed alcohol to be healthful, and safer than water.  The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Journal tells us that “In 1790, United States government figures showed that annual per-capita alcohol consumption for everybody over fifteen amounted to thirty-four gallons of beer and cider, five gallons of distilled spirits, and one gallon of wine.” For their very interesting and full report on Colonial era alcohol consumption and habits, go here:  https://bit.ly/4eo0N7B

Back in 1948 Walt Disney

(of course) seized on Chapman’s story to make a film about Johnny Appleseed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RhXXo0pEnA

What we could learn from Chapman’s story, if we wanted to was some information about early American attitudes toward alcohol, how they helped form our current attitudes, and how government policy toward alcohol has evolved over time?  As I suggested earlier, substances – not just alcohol – are very much entwined with the history of our nation. Unfortunately, we do little in our educational institutions to inform young people about this history.  Young people now in high school and college will soon be voting (perhaps as soon as the upcoming presidential election).  Some of the issues they will help decide have to do with drug policy. Later in life, they will help formulate policy.  I suggest we need a Johnny Appleseed to help seed an orchard off facts. Facts that might lead to informed debate and rational, well-thought-out decisions about future drug policy. Here in New York State, we can celebrate a bonanza year of 31 bushels of apples. What we can’t celebrate are the 6,000 or more drug overdose deaths that failed policy helps to perpetuate.