Way back on September 26, 1774, John Chapman was born.  Of course, we know him better as Johnny Appleseed.  It’s unclear whether Chapman’s publicist suggested the name change, or whether it was a nickname that just stuck.  Either way, it worked.  Johnny is often depicted as a loveable loon, wearing a pan on his head as he went merrily about planting apple trees out of the goodness of his heart.  Mind you, he really was a good guy.  But in reality, he was also a shrewd entrepreneur.  He knew what all those people moving west needed, more than anything else, was liquor.  And he knew one of the easiest ways to make it was with apples.

 

Apple trees are interesting.  Go to a nursery or an orchard and notice how all apple trees are grafts.  That’s to insure that, say, apples off of one Jonathan apple tree taste the same as apples off any other Jonathan apple tree.  In short, they’re not using seeds to grow new trees.  That’s because every seed in an apple is genetically different than the parent DNA.  That’s nature’s way of ensuring that at least one of the seeds might survive and thrive.  As such, no two apple trees grown from seed is going to bear fruit that tastes the same.  Sure, some might be better than the parent tree, but chances are, some are going to be a whole lot worse.  They might be inedible.  But they aren’t un-ciderable.  More than an apple pie, the early settlers wanted booze. 

 

Early American settlers drank like fish.  Alcoholic fish.  The earliest settlers in the New World drank around thee times as much liquor as the average person does today.  By the American Revolution, Americans were gulping down an annual average of around 3.5 gallons of pure alcohol per person.  By 1830 they averaging 7.1 gallons per person.  No matter how you water that down, it’s a lot of booze. 

 

Sure, it could’ve been the fear of bad water.  Sure, it could’ve been the nutritional value in liquor.  Sure, it could’ve been lots of things.  And it probably was.  It didn’t matter.  Our early ancestors drank a lot.  And the easiest liquor to make yourself is hard cider.  Hooch.  It’ll ferment on its own.  And if you have hard cider, all you need is a basic distillery, a boiler and some piping, and you can turn it into apple jack.  You can jack that alcohol rate from 4% to over 30%.  And that’s what a lot of people did.  All they needed were the apples. 

 

And that’s what Johnny Appleseed did.  He sold apple trees to those settlers heading off into the unknown, and he made a fortune.  He had the uncanny knack of knowing where the next drop-off point for settlers heading west was going to be.  So he went there, sometimes years ahead, and set up shop.  He would have upwards of a dozen fenced in nurseries next to rivers, managed by locals, all strategically located, just waiting.

 

Even if the settlers didn’t want to make their own booze, they still needed the apple trees.  Apple trees take a long time to get established, especially if you start from seed.  Land requirements at the time tried to dissuade homesteaders from settling on land just to resell it.  So they required apple trees to be grown because they were a long term commitment to the land.  And you could use them to make booze. 

 

Johnny Appleseed, AKA John Chapman, died on March 18, 1845.  But on a farm in Nova, Ohio, one apple tree still remains that was planted by Johnny Appleseed.  Or so the story goes.

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