Any school kid growing up in the 1960s was sure to know about the legend of Johnny Appleseed. The barefoot man walked around the country planting apple seeds as he went.

The true story of John Chapman and his tie to Marietta and the apple industry in Ohio is a little more complicated than the legend.

Native Americans loved the delicious taste of apples and other fruits. They exchanged seeds with other tribes and from European settlers in Canada and New England. By the time Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman arrived in Ohio with his bags of apple seeds, apples were already growing around the state.

Chapman was born in Leominster, Mass., in 1774. His very poor family migrated to Pennsylvania in the late 1790s before arriving in our area over the winter of 1804. They settled on land near the west fork of Duck Creek. If you travel a short distance up Ohio 821 from the Macksburg exit of I-77 you will see a historical stone marker commemorating this along the west side of the road, a short distance north of the Washington-Noble County line. His father, Nathaniel Chapman, never acquired title to the land where they lived. It is possible they simply squatted on land that had not been claimed, according to William Kerrigan in an essay in the “Settling Ohio.” Of course, no major highway was here then and the closest neighbor was 7 miles away. Two years later the dad died and the two sons walked the 7 miles to buy planks of wood to make a coffin to bury their father in an unmarked grave somewhere on the land.

Chapman used seeds that were the byproduct of cider operations back east. An apple seed planted in the ground would not necessarily produce the juicy and sweet apples you see displayed in grocery stores today. To get consistent apples you would have to graft the branch from an apple tree to the roots of a seed-grown sapling. Without grafting, the apples could be as bitter as a crabapple.

Chapman was planting seeds on land that he did not own, making nurseries of young trees throughout the countryside in the hopes of later being able to sell the young trees to nearby landowners. He established scores of these small nurseries spaced roughly every 10 miles

Even though the apples that were produced were not like what you might find today they had two very useful purposes, animal feed and cider making. The small farmers who were filling the areas between the cities in the early 1800s had livestock, and pigs loved the apples. The farmers could also use the apples to make cider. If you let cider sit for a while it will ferment and get a mild alcohol content. These subsistence farmers could produce cider without fancy equipment or costly ingredients. Of course, some of the seed-grown trees would also produce apples fit for eating.

Even though Chapman lived near present-day Macksburg his interaction with those in Marietta was minimal, according to Kerrigan. Rufus Putnam and others had already established an apple operation of their own in the new city.

Transplanted New Englanders needed to find ways to earn money, one of those ways was to grow apples to be sold downriver. Putnam brought young, grafted apple trees to be used to plant orchards to raise apples to be sold. The efforts helped to establish the crop in Ohio as a money maker. The Marietta apples were planted for income, whereas Chapman’s apples were built to help people survive in a wild frontier. As the frontier became more civilized, the demand for crude apples grown from seeds fell. Improved transportation made it possible for rural farmers to get the fruit from grafted trees to distant markets.

As the frontier moved further west, so did Chapman, He moved to the swampy area at the northwest corner of Ohio around 1830. He died in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1845.

Today, apple growing remains an important crop for Ohio, with several commercial operations near Marietta. You can pick your own apples at Hidden Hills Orchard on Ohio 26 through November. The 45th annual Apple Butter Stir-Off is this weekend at Civitan Park in Belpre. State-wide, farmers produce 50 different varieties of apples. Their efforts make Ohio one of the top 10 apple producing states in the country.

Art Smith is online manager of The Times. His column appears in the weekend edition. He can be reached at asmith@