When Paige Nichols thinks of Johnny Appleseed, a few things come to mind.
"Kind of a rugged, country boy, maybe a little scruffy," she says.
Maybe you think of the Walt Disney movie where Johnny Appleseed sings and dances as he picks his apples.
"I think very few people know the real John Chapman," Steve Fortriede, author of "Johnny Appleseed: The Man Behind The Myth" says. "I don't know that I do. But a lot of people know this Johnny Appleseed character with the tin hat and the animals following him and that wasn't it."
The Johnny Appleseed Legend
Fortriede says some people don't realize Johnny Appleseed was a real person. His real name was John Chapman.
"One of the things because he traveled around so much he would have been the local newspaper. When he comes to your house, you really want to invite him in because you're going to find out what's going on," Fortriede says.
He was born in 1774 and traveled between Ohio and Indiana planting apple tree nurseries.
According to Cheryl Ogden, the Director of the Johnny Appleseed Museum in Urbana, Ohio, he started moving west and entered Ohio in 1801. He started planting apple seeds and once those seeds became 3-5 years old he would sell them to settlers coming in.
Ogden says Chapman was a businessman - and a really good one. He provided early settlers with fruit trees so they could lay claim to a piece of property. The trees were a way for settlers to prove they were going to remain on the land.
"I kind of fight that goofball image all the time. I really get frustrated with it, but we have to embrace it. It's how people still know him today," Ogden says.
However, there are characteristics of the mythical image of Johnny Appleseed that hold true with John Chapman.
Ogden says he was extremely generous, hard working, a great story teller and, most importantly, tolerant.
But one of his most iconic trademarks - the cooking pot hat - does not hold true.
"To put the cooking pot on your head would not be practical. It would have been hot, uncomfortable, it's just not something that would have been done as a hat," Ogden says.
Controversy Over Chapman's Death
John Chapman died in 1845 in Fort Wayne, Ind., at the home of one of his friends. He's believed to be buried in the Archer Family Graveyard where memorial to Chapman sits on top of the hill.
Fortriede says no one can say for certain exactly where Chapman's body is buried because there's no definitive record of it. He says it wouldn't be worth digging up remains at this point.
This controversy became a huge problem in the 1930s when a man named Wesley Roebuck claimed Chapman died and was buried on his land across the river from the Archer Cemetery.
Fortriede says the controversy became fairly heated and was sometimes the headline in the newspaper.
But in an interview recorded after Chapman's death, they have his friend, Richard Worth revealing an important piece of information about where he died and was buried.
According to Fortriede, Worth said, "We buried him respectably in the Archer graveyard, he having died at my father's house."
This means Chapman did die on the other side of town, but was in fact buried somewhere in the hill of the Archer cemetery.
Fortriede says that out of all testimonies, that one seems to ring the most true because it was the first one recorded and from a viable source.
The important thing according to Ogden is remembering the life John Chapman lived.
"You can't judge by what you see. Because he's nothing like people believe him to be if you look at him, at least our perception of him," she says.
Ogden says Chapman died with more than 1,200 acres and $400 to his name.
She says his acts of planting apple trees created lasting effects by determining what variations of apples would thrive in a certain climate.
Only one of Chapman's apple trees is believed to still stand today. It's located in Nova, Ohio, and thought to be planted in 1837. An actual piece of that tree sits in the Johnny Appleseed Museum.
"Our assumption is that the tree was planted on an aquifer so the root system was exceptionally strong," Ogden says.
The Algea family owns it, and they welcome anyone who wants to come see it.
