Picture Johnny Appleseed, and a familiar character probably comes to mind: a barefoot wanderer in ragged clothes, perhaps wearing a cooking pot for a hat, cheerfully scattering apple seeds wherever he goes.
It's one of those stories many Americans encounter as children.
And, unlike many folk heroes, Johnny Appleseed really existed.
His name was John Chapman, and he really did travel through parts of the American frontier planting apples.
But the apples weren't necessarily the sweet, crisp kind we'd pack in a lunchbox today. Chapman was also more businessman than aimless wanderer, establishing nurseries ahead of settlers and returning to tend them. And many of the apples grown from seed were much better suited to something other than eating.
Cider.
The real story behind Johnny Appleseed is a little less sugary than the legend—but considerably more interesting.
Who Was Johnny Appleseed?
John Chapman was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1774. By the early 1800s, he was planting apple nurseries as settlement expanded westward.
Chapman traveled through areas including Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, planting seeds and establishing orchards. He often worked ahead of the expanding frontier, creating nurseries that could later supply arriving settlers.
That makes our familiar image of Johnny Appleseed scattering seeds somewhat misleading.
He wasn't simply throwing apple seeds over his shoulder and hoping for the best.
Chapman planted nurseries, cared for them, and could sell trees to settlers. Planting orchards also had practical value on the frontier, where cultivating fruit trees could help demonstrate that land was being permanently settled and improved.
In other words, Johnny Appleseed wasn't merely a folk hero.
He was a nurseryman.
And a rather clever one.
His Apples Weren't Grocery Store Apples
Here's where the Johnny Appleseed story gets particularly interesting.
If you plant a seed from your favorite apple, you shouldn't expect the resulting tree to produce the same kind of apple.
A Honeycrisp seed, for example, won't reliably grow into a tree producing Honeycrisp apples. To reproduce a particular apple variety, growers generally use techniques such as grafting.
Chapman, however, grew his trees from seed.
That meant his orchards produced enormous genetic variety—and many of the resulting apples weren't particularly pleasant to eat.
They could be small, sour, bitter, or otherwise very different from the sweet apples we expect today.
But that didn't make them useless.
Far from it.
They were often just right for cider.
The Cider Connection
Today, when Americans hear "apple cider," we might picture the cloudy, sweet, nonalcoholic drink sold at farm stands every fall.
For early Americans, cider often meant something fermented.
Hard cider was a common part of life in colonial America and on the frontier. Apples that weren't particularly appealing for eating could be pressed, and the resulting juice could be fermented.
That made an orchard useful even if its trees didn't produce beautiful dessert apples.
So when Chapman planted seedling after seedling across the frontier, he wasn't necessarily creating orchards filled with future pie apples.
He was planting something settlers could turn into cider.
That detail largely disappeared from the children's-book version of Johnny Appleseed.
How John Chapman Became Johnny Appleseed
The historical Chapman was already an unusual and memorable figure.
He traveled extensively, lived simply, and became known for his religious beliefs as well as his apple nurseries. Stories about him circulated during and after his lifetime, gradually blurring the line between biography and folklore.
Eventually, John Chapman became Johnny Appleseed, a symbol of generosity, simplicity, nature, and the American frontier.
Popular culture helped cement that image.
One particularly influential version arrived in 1948, when Walt Disney's animated film Melody Time included a Johnny Appleseed segment. Its cheerful, gentle Johnny helped reinforce the children's-story version of the character for generations of Americans.
The legend isn't entirely fiction.
Chapman really did carry apple seeds. He really did plant orchards across the frontier. And he apparently lived an unconventional life.
It's what happened around those facts that turned history into folklore.
From Hard Cider to Cider Doughnuts
Our recipe takes Johnny's cider connection in a sweeter—and decidedly more modern—direction.
Apple cider doughnuts have become one of the great pleasures of an autumn orchard visit.
They're tender, warmly spiced, and coated in cinnamon sugar, with concentrated apple cider providing a subtle fruity flavor.
The doughnut itself also has a long American history. The word “dough-nut” appeared in American writing by the early 19th century, and Washington Irving described balls of sweetened fried dough in his 1809 History of New York. The familiar ring shape came later; a popular tradition credits Maine sailor Hansen Gregory with devising a hole in the center to help fried cakes cook more evenly, though the precise history is difficult to establish with certainty.
For our fall version, we're adding another piece of American food history to the mix: apples.
Let's make some doughnuts.
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