Exhibit On Real Johnny Appleseed To Hit the Road

An anonymous reader writes with this story about a traveling Johnny Appleseed exhibit set to hit the road sometime next year. If you picture Johnny Appleseed as a loner wearing a tin pot for a hat and flinging apple seeds across the countryside, experts say you're wrong. They're hoping that a traveling exhibit funded by an anonymous donation to a western Ohio center and museum will help clear misconceptions about the folk hero and the real man behind the legend. "We want people around the country to know the real person, not just the myths and folklore," said Cheryl Ogden, director of the Johnny Appleseed Educational Center and Museum at Urbana University in Urbana. "We want them to know John Chapman's values of hard work, compassion and generosity." Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed to generations of Americans, was a pioneer nurseryman in the late 18th and early 19th centuries credited with introducing apple trees to portions of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia. While it's probably true that he lived outdoors and wore ragged clothes, at least sometimes, researchers doubt he wore a pot on his head or just gave his seedlings and nurseries away.

Comments

bringing booze to a thirsty frontier

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in his day, hard cider was the dominant form of alcoholic beverage in the frontier. Easy to make, easy to grow. Beer requires growing grain, then processing, and fermenting, and storing. Grapes don't grow in the area.

Re:bringing booze to a thirsty frontier

[Anonymous Coward]

John Chapman was substantially earlier.. think late 1700s, early 1800s, back when "frontier" was just over the mountains from the east coast. No trains, not even wagon trains, out west. The idea of farming large areas of grain really didn't come about until post-railroad, or late 1800s.
There was some whiskey production in colonial times, but rum was also popular (viz: triangle trade), but I suspect that transportation costs to the frontier was excessive. And besides, your thirsty farmer/hunter/pioneer probably wasn't looking for high proof distilled spirits, rather, they sought a replacement for the omnipresent beer and ale of the old country. The whole fermentation thing helps with pathogens too (or, at least, if you do have pathogens, your fermentation will smell and look "off", and you can discard it). Much like how fermentation in sausages helps suppress pathogenic anaerobic growth (like botulism).

Corn (maize) as a base for fermentation got started early in the corn growing areas (Tennessee, Kentucky), but up in Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc., I don't think corn grows very well. Apples, on the other hand, grow great, and tolerate (nay, demand) the freeze of winter. Apples also preserve well (a barrel of apples packed in straw will last a long time in a cellar, although as we know, one bad apple can spoil the bushel). Fermented corn mush is not particularly appetizing, and I suppose one can make corn beer, but if it were any good at all, surely modern craft brewers would be making it. It's probably not a great grain compared to the more popular barley, wheat and rice. (Yes, modern commercial beer probably has substantial corn in it, because, hey, fermenting HFCS gives you nice ethanol, which you can filter and blend with anything)

Commercial whiskey production in the US probably came about when it got popular in the UK, which in turn was due to a change in taxation and the lack of port/sherry. The industrial revolution made distillation on a production scale possible (since you use steam to heat the wort in the still) and you need "big" equipment to do 1000 gallon batches. I don't think they were hammering out big sheets of copper in 1795 in the frontier.

By the time of "real men and the wild west", you're talking post railroad, post large scale agriculture with feedlots and so forth, so, yeah, whiskey manufacture (from any of several grains) would be quite popular, and the train and barge made it possible to send carloads of whiskey barrels into the west (e.g. Dodge City.. hardly "west" compared to California, but that was west back then).

Re:He was anti GMO

[ChromeAeonium]

That's close, but not entirely true. Some apple trees are triploid, like Gravenstein and Jonagold, but most are diploid, so not really polyploid. Apple seeds will grow just fine, but the reason they are grafted is because they are very heterozygous, and as such, any seedlings will not have the same genetic characteristics as the original parent apples, and in all likelihood will be inferior. When people breed apple trees, they can go through thousands of seedlings only to find one tree with superior fruit. By grafting, you keep the superior genetics of an exceptional fruit, like Honeycrisp. Most fruit crops are reproduced asexually in some way for this reason, with the exception of cantaloupe, watermelon, and papaya, which have much shorter lifespans, and as such are much easier to work with. Trees are also grafted because, by using mature plant material, the tree will come to bearing faster, and you can select rootstock that offers dwarfing and disease resistance traits, which are useful.

You are right that he was against grafting though, proclaiming that it was wicked, damaging, and against the will of God. Unfortunately, judging by the modern opposition to GMOs, humanity did not learn anything from his silliness. Today, we have opposition to the Arctic apples, which hopefully will be released soon, which have the relatively simple trait of non-browning. Anti-GMO people claim they are worried that GMO apples will cross pollinate other apples, despite the simple fact that apples are asexually propagated. That's right, these folks don't know the first, most basic things about apple biology, but damn it they're going to pound in their stupid point anyway no matter how wrong they are. Ridiculous.