The Spirit of Johnny Appleseed Lives: A Short History of Apples in America

~Continuously updated~

Not native to American soil,  the apple has played a major role in our country's history - a history that for many is still carried on today.  So,  yes,  there is a history lesson here,  one that is not quite as well known as the other lessons of the past,  but so important nonetheless.  This goes to show that the spirit of John Chapman  (aka Johnny Appleseed)  does indeed live on in the 21st century!

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I see a pie.  What do you see?

Apple cider mills are big business in the fall here in Michigan,  and every September,  we - my wife & I with our kids & grandkids,  and sometimes various other family members & friends  - join in the tradition and venture out to the apple orchard and cider mill to experience the season of autumn in one of the best ways we know how:  by picking apples,  drinking cider,  and eating freshly made doughnuts.
Yeah...we're  those  kind of people! 
And here in Michigan there are more cider mills than one can shake a stick at,  and each can be pretty unique unto itself,  from the ginormous commercial ventures that have singing hillbilly bears,  witches flying into poles,  and skeletons sitting on the toilet telling awful jokes,  to the basic no frills apples,  cider,  and doughnuts with little else,  which is the kind of mill I prefer - the no frills variety.
Our day usually ends with my wife baking a couple of homemade apple pies!
It's a tradition we've had for over thirty years,  and there are no signs of us stopping.

Heirloom apple tasting
at Firestone Farm

What really spurred my apple interest was visiting the 1880s Firestone Farm heirloom apple tree orchard when they used to host a tour given by historic presenters during Greenfield Village's fall harvest weekends.  They did a fine job detailing the history of each of their heirloom apple trees in the Firestone orchard,  which is still filled with a number of 19^th century and earlier varieties of apple trees,  and we were able to see a wide selection of red,  green,  brown,  yellow,  and speckled apples growing upon them.  Names like Rambo  (around 1640),  Baldwin  (1740),  Maiden's Blush  (early 1800's),  Belmont  (late 18^th century – one of Johnny Appleseed’s favorites!),  Roxbury Russet  (from before 1649 - possibly America’s oldest apple variety),  and Hubbardston Nonesuch  (early 1800’s)  and a number of other varieties no longer readily available here in the 21st century can be found there.  They all have different characteristics,  textures,  flavors,  and ultimately were used in different ways,  either for sale,  or for the family’s own use.  With such a large amount of apples,  there was a need for storage,  and those not carefully packed away in sawdust were made into apple butter,  apple sauce,  pies,  dowdies,  dumplings,  fritters,  and cider.

I have even had the wonderful experience of drinking apple cider made from a hand-cranked apple press,  for our reenacting unit purchased one!
I can just hear many of you saying to me,  "Ken,  it's no big deal.  They're only apples."
Yeah...whatever.  And the Super Bowl is just another football game,  right?  (Well,  to me it is!).
But as I have written in previous postings,  food is such an important part of our history,  and it has,  unfortunately,  been relegated to be considered of little worth.  Yet,  in all actuality,  its significance is just as important as any other part of our history.

Mostly McIntosh apples from the late 18th fill our crate.
Or from the early 19th century.  I have found two sources giving two conflicting reports.

And that brings me back to apples.  Maybe after reading this posting you might look at that wondrous fruit a little differently,  for apples in the United States have an interesting history:
Sacks of apple seeds were first brought to North America by colonists in the early 1600s.  Before that time,  the only apples native to this continent were crab apples  (also referred to as  "common apples").
By the mid-1600s,  apple orchards with thousands of trees had been planted specifically for cider,  a replacement for the poor quality water that was not fit for drinking.  The proliferation of apple trees grew to the point where cider became the national drink of choice and was also used for barter.

And making cider has an interesting history.

To make cider,  you must first extract the juice from apples — a process that typically involves chopping or grinding the fruit into small pieces.  Pressure is put on the fruit to extract as much juice as possible.  Then,  the pomace  (pressed fruit pulp)  is discarded,  and the juice is fermented.

2,000 years ago,  a cider such as this stone mill was used.  
A huge,  horse-powered vertical millstone would rotate around the trench,  the apples
would be pulverized and pressed,  and the juice could be collected.
These were used into the Medieval period.

From the stone mill,  cider makers went to this next style of mill.

I've searched and searched but cannot find the era of this contraption.  As far as I can tell,  it looks to be an apple masher/cruncher and not a mill.  Again,  this could be around
the Medieval period.  But don't quote me on that.

The stone mill was eventually overtaken by the screw press,  which was invented in the 13th century A.D.  Its mechanics should be familiar to anyone with a home cider-pressing setup — the apples are ground,  then placed in some kind of filtering mechanism,  then pressed by a weight attached to a large screw-type mechanism at the top.

The screw press.

A screw press could be human-powered and process smaller batches,  extracting more juice more efficiently,  and the general design is the basis for most home-sized cider presses and some commercial-scale equipment still used today.  The pulp would be wrapped into package-like masses using lengths of straw or hay — the spent pomace was going to feed farm animals in the end,  anyway.

It looks like I'm grabbing a Baldwin  (from the 1740s).
Looks can be deceiving - I snatched nothing!
Just a posed picture.

Apple harvesting could take place anytime from summer,  with such pre-fall varieties as the Hightop Sweet apples,  through late autumn.  In his diary from November,  Noah Blake wrote:

"November 10

Sunday.  Robert Adams will come over tomorrow to help with the apples.

November 11

Spent the day gathering apples.  Robert stayed over.

November 12

More work in the orchard.

November 13

Gathered cyder apples.  Will drive them to the village tomorrow and deliver Robert to his home."

The spirit of Samuel Daggett mayhaps?

So...here I am,  having a bit of fun with photoshop.

We know Samuel Daggett,  who's 1750 farmhouse,  in which he himself built  

(seen on the right in this photo),  sits inside historic Greenfield Village,  had 

a large apple orchard and a cider press on his property.  

It's said that some of the  "descendants"  of these apple trees he planted back in 

the 18th century still remain on the original land on which the Daggett House 

once stood in Coventry  (now Andover),  Connecticut.  I don't know for certain,  for 

I have not ever been there yet  (though I hope to visit someday and see it for myself). 

On October 23,  1767,  Samuel Daggett noted in his account book that he had sold:

10 quartz of cyder

15 quartz of cyder

5 quartz of cyder

19 gallons of cyder by the barrel

And that's just on one day!

I imagine it may have looked something like this 250 years ago...

Also,  just to note how important apples for cider was to Samuel,  from his own account book we see that in the year 1763  "I made 21 barils of cider."

And in the following years he also made:

1764 - 7 barils

1765 - 16 barils

1766 - 8 barils

1767 - 10 barils

1768 - 20 barils

1769 - 19 barils

Getting the  "barils"  ready to be filled with cyder...
By the way,  it takes approximately 30 to 40 apples to yield one gallon of cider,  and,  depending on the size of the barrel used,  about 40 gallons of cider,  or slightly more,  would fill an 18th century barrel. 

And it would take about 60 to 65 gallons  (or more,  depending)  to fill a hogshead, 

as seen in the Daggett kitchen below left:

Here is a great comparison of a couple of barrels to the larger hogshead  (on the left).

This photo was taken inside the Daggett kitchen.

I suppose in a way I like to think that the world of Sam Daggett is being represented in the pictures here,  for I have little doubt his apple yield was similar to what you see in the  "Spirit of Samuel Daggett"  photo a few pictures up..

In 1777.  during the American Revolution,  long-time cider lover,  John Adams,  wrote to his wife Abigail:  "I would give three guineas  (a little more than three pounds - 60 shillings - at the time)  for a barrel of your cider.  Not one drop of it is to be had here  (in Philadelphia)  for gold."

The apple played a major role in American life from the outset.  The popularity of cider drinking has been mentioned already,  but cider itself was the raw material for other products that were essential to the colonists.

For one thing,  cider can be easily transformed into cider vinegar.  The change will happen spontaneously if too much air gets into the cider barrel during fermentation.  Otherwise,  a barrel of cider mixed with a third of a barrel of water was fitted with a loose-fitting lid and would include yeast.  In three to four weeks,  the yeast would convert the alcohol in the cider to acetic acid,   which is the sour basis for vinegar.  The cider was diluted to prevent the end product from becoming too strong.

The vinegar was used in pickling,  one of the important methods of preserving vegetables and fruits for winter use before the invention of  air-tight canning in the early 19th century  (canning was the newest of the food preservations methods being pioneered in the 1790s).

Apple cider also could be distilled to make a type of  apple brandy,  popularly called Applejack  (but I have also read that the word  Applejack  was not used until 1816,  this according to the etymology of the word,  that it was called simply  "cider"  or  "apple brandy").  However,  I've read that the word  "applejack"  refers to its traditional freeze distillation,  or  "jacking,"  technique.  This is when a barrel of fermented cider was allowed to sit outdoors for part of the winter.  Freezing this fermented cider causes the alcohol to become concentrated in the center of the barrel.  By around February,  the  "applejack"  can be enjoyed by boring a hole through the barrel to the  "core"  to syphon out the powerful cider.   And this is why  "Applejack"  is especially associated with the northern colonies,  because the weather had to be quite cold for the recipe to work.  

A milder form of cider was called  "ciderkin"  or  "watercider."    

After the establishment of orchards along the Atlantic coast,  a second wave of apple varieties much further inland began with the distribution of seedling trees by none other than John Chapman,  more popularly known as Johnny Appleseed.

"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."

One sketch of Johnny Appleseed

It was into this apple-laden world that John Chapman was born, on September 26,  1774,  in Leominster, Massachusetts.  Much of his early years have been lost to history, though we know that his father,  Nathaniel Chapman,  was a Minuteman who fought the British at Concord in 1775,  served under Israel Putman at the Battle of Bunker Hill,  and was a soldier in the Continental Army under George Washington. 
In the early 1800s,  John Chapman reappears, this time on the western edge of Pennsylvania, near the country's rapidly expanding Western frontier. 
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. 
Whenever Johnny Appleseed came to a region that wasn't settled,  he would plant or distribute his seeds.  Some said he carried the seeds in leather bags on his shoulders as he walked along the trails,  and others reported seeing him paddling up and down rivers in a canoe. 
For clothing Johnny Appleseed wore the homespun buckskin of the settlers,  and the story of him sometimes wearing a tin pan upon his head,  I've come to find,  was true!

Johnny Appleseed blowing his
powder horn to warn folks of a
possible attack

No one knew the frontier trails and woods as well as Johnny Appleseed.  Even the Indians respected him.  Because of this reputation,  Johnny was allowed to move about freely without much concern,  and,  according to legend,  he became a one-man warning system and alerted isolated families and settlements of impending dangers,  including Indian attacks,  by blasting an old powder horn.

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.

It wasn't that Chapman—or the frontier settlers—didn't have the knowledge necessary for grafting,  but like New Englanders,  they found that their effort was better spent planting apples for drinking,  not for eating.  Apple cider provided those on the frontier with a safe, stable source of drink,  and in a time and place where water could be full of dangerous bacteria,  cider could be imbibed without worry.  Cider was a huge part of frontier life,  and for transplanted New Englanders on the frontier,  cider was as much a part of the dining table as meat or bread.

At age 70,  Johnny Appleseed visited his friend William Worth in Fort Wayne,  Indiana.  On the evening of March 18,  1845,  he had some milk and bread,  read out loud from the Bible,  laid down on the floor to sleep and never woke up.
Many of his orchards and apple varieties didn't survive much longer.  By the time the U.S.  government outlawed alcohol in 1920,  Chapman had become an American folk hero.  But this didn't stop the axes of FBI agents who mercilessly tore down orchards that produced sour,  bitter apples used for cider to prevent the making of homemade hooch.  Aside from slaughtering Chapman's trees,  this also nearly killed America's connection to hard cider. 
This not only effectively erased cider,  but it erased Chapman's true history from American life.   
Apple growers were forced to celebrate the fruit not for its intoxicating values,  but for its nutritional benefits - its ability,  taken once a day,  to keep the doctor away... 
In a way,  this saying  (adage?)—so favorable by modern standards—was nothing less than  "an attack on a typically American libation." 
Today, America's cider market is seeing a modest,  but marked,  resurgence as the fastest growing alcoholic beverage in America.  Chapman,  however,  remains  "frozen in the realm of Disney,  destined to wander in America's collective memory with a sack full of perfectly edible,  gleaming apples."

The orchard at Ross's in Romeo, Michigan

But not all of the apples that came from Chapman's orchards were destined to be forgotten.  Wandering the modern supermarket,  we have Chapman to thank for varieties like the Delicious,  the Golden Delicious,  and more.  His penchant toward propagation by seed lent itself to creating the great—and perhaps more importantly—hardy American apple.  Had Chapman and the settlers opted for grafting,  the uniformity of the apple product would have lent to a staid and relatively boring harvest.  It was the seeds,  and the cider,  that give the apple the opportunity to discover by trial and error the precise combination of traits required to prosper in the New World.  From Chapman's vast planting of nameless cider apple seeds came some of the great American cultivars of the 19th century.
The beverage rooted deep in our history has only recently seen a resurgence in popularity. 

By the way,  Nova,  Ohio holds a 176-year-old tree,  the last known to be planted by Johnny Appleseed himself.  It grows tart green apples, which are now used for applesauce and baking in addition to cider making.  While Chapman might be glad to see his seeds still bearing fruit,  he'd likely be sad to hear this tree is a noted bud source for grafting new apple trees.

Even though Johnny Appleseed did not believe in grafting,  many others did from years before up to our modern times,  and through it all such a variety of apples as one had never seen was the result.  Due to grafting,  orchards with named selections were planted for the first time.  By 1850,  uncounted named apple varieties for cooking,  cider,  apple butter,  applesauce,  drying,  pickling,  vinegar,  wine,  livestock food,  and even to eat as a treat were listed in nursery catalogs.  
Over time,  especially due to prohibition in the 1920s and early '30s  (which helped the growing popularity of soft drinks such as Coca Cola,  Dr. Pepper,  and Hires Root Beer),  apples became and were promoted as a popular eating snack rather than for drinking  (remember,  "an apple a day..."),  therefore the  'look'  of the fruit became all important; perfectly round,  bright red or green with no blemishes was sought - the perfect supermarket fruit.

In the 19th century,  farmers would haul their apples to cider mills 
like this one to have them ground and pressed into cider.  In the 
21st century,  the popularity of visiting the cider mill here in 
Michigan and in New England has gone through the roof,  only 
it's not the farmers who visit,  but city dwellers who want to 
experience the old-time woodenness of days gone by and yet still 
have fun things to do for the kids.

As living historians,  we will oftentimes put on a fall harvest presentation during autumn events.  I have been lucky enough to purchase heirloom apples through a variety of internet sources as well as a few locals,  including Ross's Stony Creek in Romeo. 
Yes,  I try to go the extra mile to get history!

Here are the heirloom apples I chose to display a few years back:
 Roxbury Russett,  Cox's Orange Pippin,  Pitmaston Pine Apple, 
Ribstin Pippin,  Maiden's Blush,  and the Hubbardson Nonesuch.    
Photo taken by Charlotte Bauer


Here's another display:
One of the questions I like to ask the visitors is,  "Would you buy 
these apples if you saw them in a store?"
Most respond with a  "No!"  and explain their reasons as being they 
are two small or discolored or they are unfamiliar with the brands.
Time to give a history lesson...

Here are close ups of a few popular early varieties:

Roxbury Russet is generally recognized to be the oldest apple variety which originated in North America,  and its history can be traced back to the colonial era.  It is very probably a seedling of an apple variety brought over by early settlers from Europe.
It was named in the mid-17th century in the former Town of Roxbury,  part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony southwest of  what is now a part of  Boston.

The Snow Apple is also known as the Fameuse apple and is thought to have originated in Quebec in the early 1600s,  making its way down along the east coast colonies into the 18th century.

Ribston Pippin from the early 1700s England.  This variety was first brought to North America just prior to the Revolution by Benjamin Vaughan,  who grew it on his farm in Hallowell,  Maine,  and promoted its spread up and down the Kennebec River. 

I really enjoy researching and then teaching the historical things few others think about,  even something as  'minor'  as apples  (though they weren't minor to the people living back in the day).
And I really enjoy seeing the popularity of the cider mill continue to rise,  with families heading out in droves on autumn weekends.  There are just some traditions that will continue to be a mainstay in our society,  and visiting the cider mill in autumn is one of those wonderful traditions we have here in Michigan  (as long as the mills don't price themselves out of business!).
Yeah...Johnny Appleseed/Chapman may not have approved of grafting,  but something tells me he would be pretty pleased at the continued popularity of his favorite fruit.

By the way,  here are a few video clips I took in 2014 at the Firestone Farm apple tour:

Maiden's Blush

Hubbardson Nonesuch

Rambo

Well,  I certainly hope you enjoyed this romp through American apple history!  Now do yourself a favor and enjoy a fresh home-baked apple pie!

And God said,  Let the earth bring forth grass,  the herb yielding 
seed,  and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind,  whose seed is 
in itself,  upon the earth:  and it was so.  And the earth brought 
forth grass,  and herb yielding seed after his kind,  and the tree 
yielding fruit,  whose seed was in itself,  after his kind:  and God 
saw that it was good. 
(Genesis 1:11-12)

Until next time,  see you in time.

Information about the history of apples in the U.S. came from the following sources:
The Smithsonian Institute
Apples of North America by Tom Burford
American Folklore and Legend by The Reader's Digest

Cider Press information came from THIS site

I also garnered information from THIS page on word etymology

As well as the book  "Apples:  History,  Folklore,  Horticulture,  and Gastronomy"

National Center For Home Food Preservation also has wonderful information that helped me here.

Also the very well written pamphlet  "Colonial Sweets & Spirits"  by Patricia B.  Mitchell  (if you can find it) 

And for more blogs related to this one:
Cooking on the Hearth
A Taste of History
A Year on a Colonial Farm

To read more about life on a colonial farm,  please click HERE

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