EARLY OHIO REAL ESTATE SPECULATOR

Every year just about this time, a small grove of apple trees surrounding a grave in Fort Wayne, Ind., bursts into bloom in tribute to the man thought to be buried there -- John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed. Note the "thought to be." There's a chance Chapman was interred across the St. Joseph River. With Chapman, the record is rarely entirely clear.

We know for certain that Chapman was born Sept. 26, 1774, in Leominster, Mass., and that his mother died two years later, while his father was serving in the Revolutionary Army. But solid evidence of Chapman's first decades amounts to two thin entries. On Feb. 14, 1797, he bought a small auger at a Warren, Pa., trading post. Three years later, the U.S. Census found him living a day's walk south in Venango County, near Franklin.

Of Chapman's Ohio and Indiana years -- beginning roughly in 1803 -- the record is more certain. Chapman leased or bought land in eight Ohio counties. He also appears to have planted nurseries in an additional eight counties, including Licking. In Indiana, he operated in Jay and Allen counties.

If the record grows clearer as Chapman ages, though, Chapman himself has long been a hidden part of the American story, inseparable from the 1948 Disney cartoon version of Johnny Appleseed -- a celluloid sermon that stresses simple saintliness but mostly ignores the actual man.

One early Ohio chronicler calls John Chapman "the oddest character in all our history." Chapman dressed in rags and slept in hollow logs. He was a loner, a roamer, as restless as the new nation, and yet for all his eccentricities, he was deeply a part of the America of his day: a real-estate speculator and tireless evangelist who carried the revelations of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg to rude cabins at the edge of civilization.

Even Chapman's famous nursery work had a calculated quality. The development companies that owned huge swaths of Ohio required purchasers to plant orchards as proof they were staying put.

Chapman remains increasingly relevant to our own times, as well. Nearly two centuries before the Simplicity Movement was born, Chapman had created a lifestyle that was simplicity itself. Long before all but a handful of people realized what a fragile creation this Earth is, Chapman was there, too, showing us by example how to love this whirling globe better.

The myths that built up around this infinitely gentle man during and after his life were many. No myth, though, can top Chapman's real final days in this world. He had walked 15 miles roundtrip on March 17, 1845, to repair a bramble fence that protected one of his nurseries. On the way back, he got caught in a snowstorm. Near sunset, Chapman reached a cabin and asked to spend the night. As was his custom, he refused a place at the table, taking milk and bread by the fire and later treating his hosts to "news right fresh from heaven."

That night, Chapman slept on the hearth. By morning, a fever had gripped him, and by noon, he was dead. The physician who attended him later said he had never seen a man so at peace in his final passage. Years afterward, those present would describe the corpse as almost glowing with serenity. Chapman was 70 years old.

Howard Means is the author of "Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story," published by Simon & Schuster

Copied from Newark Advocate, May 4, 2011.