Johnny Appleseed: the folk hero who died here, and lies here

1774-1845

The man behind the legend: John Chapman was born on 26 September 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts, and Fort Wayne makes no claim on his birth or his upbringing. The claim is the other end of the life, and it is one of the strongest in this section. Chapman, the wandering nurseryman the frontier called Johnny Appleseed, spent the last decades of his life planting and tending apple nurseries across Ohio and Indiana, and the Fort Wayne vicinity was one of his home grounds: the Fort Wayne Sentinel, printing his death notice in March 1845, told its readers that the deceased was well known through this region and had been a regular visitor here upwards of twenty years. He came here in life, season after season, and he died here, and the ground the nation visits to remember him is Fort Wayne ground.

The death, with its bracket: In March 1845, visiting friends north of the town, Chapman took ill and died at the cabin of William Worth. The Fort Wayne Sentinel carried the notice on 22 March 1845. The record does not fix the day: local tellings print both 12 March and 18 March 1845, and Harper's Magazine's famous 1871 account gave the year itself as 1847. This section prints what the Sentinel's own columns support, death in March 1845, and names the variance rather than choosing a day the evidence will not carry. He was seventy years old, and the Sentinel's notice, which called him well known and remembered his eccentric kindness, is one of the earliest documents of the legend.

The grave: "We buried him respectably," Richard Worth said in 1858, "in David Archer's grave yard, two and a half miles north of Fort Wayne." The National Park Service's nomination for the memorial park repeats the judgment that there is no other site in the state so closely associated with Chapman's productive life. The exact spot within the old Archer farm is disputed, with a second tradition pointing to ground now under the Canterbury Green development, but both candidate grounds were Archer farm, and the marked grave stands on the mound in what is now Johnny Appleseed Memorial Park, along the St. Joseph River. The park and the Johnny Appleseed Memorial Bridge beside it were dedicated on 21 May 1949, and the park entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Since 1974 the Johnny Appleseed Festival has filled the park each September, drawing more than 300,000 visitors in a weekend: a folk hero claimed by the whole country, buried, as far as any evidence anywhere can show, in Fort Wayne.

Sources:

1. National Park Service, National Register nomination form for Johnny Appleseed Memorial Park (the Archer cemetery grave; the Sentinel notice of 22 March 1845 quoted; the 21 May 1949 dedication; the judgment on the Fort Wayne association, drawing on Price, Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth).
2. Allen County Genealogical Society, Johnny Appleseed gravesite and John Chapman pages (the death-date variance; the festival from 1974 and its attendance; the disputed grave site traditions).
3. Fort Wayne Sentinel, 22 March 1845 (the death notice).