MOUNT VERNON — In early September of 1813, tensions were running high along the Ohio frontier.
The United States was at war with Great Britain, and through their fort at Detroit, the British were encouraging natives displaced by encroaching white settlements to attack.
In reality, the Indians didn’t attack in north central Ohio until the settlers struck first, burning down the Greentown Indian village after forcibly escorting the natives out of the area.
After the initial attacks, it must have felt to the settlers like wholescale war was about to erupt.
For the handful of settlers in the recently established village of Mansfield, that was especially worrisome, because the militia was on patrol, and was thought to be down in Mount Vernon, some 30 miles south.
Mansfielders huddled in the defensive blockhouse on the square as the day slipped into twilight and talked about trying to send a runner to fetch support.
The anxious settlers no doubt discussed the near-disaster that had happened the previous year when settler John Laylan attempted the same trek at night, as discussed in this column last week.
The thought must have held that to make this passage successfully, the courier would have to go as fast as possible, and avoid traditional native paths wherever possible.
This would now be possible because of the new road that had been cut through the woods from Mount Vernon, north to Clinton, then through the valley and up into Fredericktown, then north out of Fredericktown along the path that a tornado had cleared a couple of years earlier.
This went past the Quaker church north of Fredericktown, and over the hills to McClure’s blockhouse, a fortified farm that in a few years would become known as Bellville.
The new road continued north from Bellville, running over steep hills instead of routing around them, until it finally ran up the hill and into Mansfield’s town square.
To make the trek by horse would make too much noise, dooming the rider to be intercepted. The best chance was for a fast, light runner. But who?
“I’ll do it,” a soft voice spoke up from the corner of the blockhouse. A wiry man — about 5-foot-9, according to later accounts — and wearing ragged clothes and a broad-brimmed hat stepped forward.
He wasn’t wearing any shoes because he didn’t own any. His stated intention was to run on the new road, barefoot, all the way to Mount Vernon to raise the alarm.
His name was Jonathan Chapman.
Chapman was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1774. One of his sisters later commented that even as a boy, Jonathan was fascinated by nature, animals, and the stars. He would much rather spend his time outside than indoors.
Nonetheless, his family managed to keep him inside the school long enough to get a thorough education. But as soon as Johnny reached maturity, he had other ideas than leading a conventional career path.
Doubly struck with religious fervor and a strong urge to create a career on the frontier, he headed west in the mid 1790s.
In Pennsylvania, Chapman stopped wherever he found cider mills and picked through their discarded mash to extract apple seeds. His idea was to start apple nurseries in the Ohio country and sell apple tree seedlings to settlers as they arrived.
Remarkably enough, Johnathan had been given permission to bring his 11-year-old half-brother Nathaniel with him as an assistant.
Nathaniel was apparently not as fond as Johnny of sleeping in the wild, for when the rest of the family moved west to Ohio, Nate opted to stay with them and farm.
After that, Johnny was mostly alone, although he did have periods where he was accompanied by a wild wolf whom Johnny had nursed back to health.
Chapman worked his way up the Muskingum River valley system, and began planting nurseries of apple trees.
He planted at least two in Knox County, one near the Coshocton County border; the other along the banks of Owl Creek adjacent to what is now the viaduct that connects the two halves of Mount Vernon.
He further had nurseries around Loudonville and Perrysville, leading up into Mansfield.
He would buy the land, plant the seeds, construct some sort of fence to protect the seedlings from deer, then offer to split his proceeds with someone local if they would tend the seedlings while he continued onward.
It’s doubtful if many descendants of Chapman’s are still around today, because most of them would have been torn out and replanted with sweeter apples. The kinds of apples that “Appleseed John,” as he soon became known, was planting were sour apples.
These were the kind of apples used for making apple jack, a kind of hard cider, which was the first alcohol to appear on the frontier, and one that was highly desired by settlers.
Farmers who also had access to strong sweeteners, such as maple syrup, could have also used such apples for baking pies, tarts, crumbles, and such.
The image of Chapman in ragged clothes without shoes is truthful. It wasn’t because he was poor.
By the time of the War of 1812, “Johnny Appleseed,” as the nickname he was now known by, was a wealthy man who owned hundreds of acres of land across Ohio, to which he added more in the coming years.
Yet he had no interest in fancy clothes and luxurious living.
According to A. Banning Norton’s 1862 History of Knox County, “In personal appearance he was prepossessing, when one could get sight of his eyes and well-formed head; about medium height, quick and restless and uneasy in his motions, and exceedingly uncouth in dress.”
If he stayed with a family, he’d sleep on the floor. As the years progressed and Chapman got more used to sleeping outside, he’d often just ask a farm family for permission to sleep on their grounds.
One place he was known to stop as he came through southern Richland County was the Niman spring at the Schrack home and stagecoach inn on Pleasant Valley Road.
A few years back, some scholars attempted to attack the popular image of Appleseed wearing a tin pot for a hat.
The fact is, it’s real enough, for it was witnessed by an Ashland County girl who later reported it to a local historian when she was elderly. It was probably actually a hat made out of tin that could double as a cook pot, handy for making food.
What exactly he made, we don’t know, but there are reports that Appleseed was a vegetarian.
While he often bartered for castoff clothes, he was also reported a number of times to have constructed a shirt by taking a coffee bean bag and cutting a neck hole and arm holes into it.
On other occasions he was known to wear a broad-brimmed hat, or even an old military officer’s cap that someone had given him. He was clearly an eccentric with his own style.
While the popular image sees him as strewing apple seeds as he walked, he typically only kept them for his nurseries.
He would strew herb seeds as he walked, though, and he periodically made sure to have a box of religious tracts delivered to a frontier location so he could distribute them in his travels.
He was a follower of The New Church, which was organized around the teachings of the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, a Christian reformer who said that religion had declined because of fear and empty practices.
Sounds like we could use him today.
On that ominous evening in September 1813, Chapman volunteered to run to Mount Vernon.
He reasoned that he was fast, he knew the way well, and that among all of them, he was the one most likely to be left alone by the Indians, who were said to have regarded Chapman as a medicine man, one given special status and access because of his spiritual nature.
The Mansfield villagers agreed.
As dark fell, Johnny Appleseed headed south from the square in Mansfield, running down the newly cut path that is today Ohio 13 South.
That route today bypasses the worst of the hills in its four-lane thrust past I-71 and Walmart.
But if you go onto Possum Run Road, then continue straight on German Church Road, you are on the original path Chapman ran, going up and down the hills between Mansfield and Bellville.
As he ran through, he briefly stopped at every cabin, rapped on their door, and alerted the residents to the Indian attack, then kept going.
He reached McClure’s blockhouse in what is today, Bellville, alerted them, and kept running.
He ran south, up into the hills, and on to the Quaker settlement on Zolman Road, where his warning caused elder Samuel Wilson to be so scared that he shot out of his house carrying his pants, and didn’t put them on until he reached Fredericktown.
Chapman continued on from there to Clinton, and finally into Mount Vernon.
In Mount Vernon, Chapman raised the militia, whose members got on their horses and rode back with Johnny, making it back into Mansfield by sunrise the following morning.
If the revenge-seeking natives had any plans of attacking Mansfield, they gave it up when the militia was seen arriving, and Johnny Appleseed’s heroic run became one of the most famous moments in the turbulent history of frontier Ohio.
According to Norton, the last time Johnny Appleseed visited Mount Vernon was 1829, when he pointed out the land that he owned on the north bank of the Kokosing, and said he “might be back” at some point to do something with it.
He never returned.
