Johnny Appleseed died in Fort Wayne and lies under the marker in Johnny Appleseed Park.

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Johnny Appleseed's grave marker in Johnny Appleseed Park, Fort Wayne Charles W. Chapman · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source file

PEOPLE

The death, Fort Wayne, 18 March 1845. The Fort Wayne Sentinel of 22 March 1845 (p.2) records John Chapman's death “on the same day” as Thomas McJanet's; the Times and Peoples Press of the same date fixes McJanet to the 18th, closing the ambiguity (Fortriede, ACPL, 1978). Estate papers, 42 probate documents, and the 1848–49 tax sales of his land corroborate a local 1845 death.

Burial in David Archer's family burying ground by the feeder canal (Dawson, 1871; an 1858 interview; John H. Archer's 1900 letter).

The exact grave under today's marker. Archer's own 1900 letter: the headboards had rotted and “I do not think that any person could, with any degree of certainty, come within fifty feet of locating the grave.” The marker, and the 1934 Memorial Commission vote that kept its site, ratify a tradition, not a located grave. The rival Canterbury Green stone marks the cabin where he died, not a burial.

The rival dates: 11 March 1845 (Dawson's recollection, 1871), 1843 (Griswold, 1917), summer 1847 (Harper's, 1871). The tin-pot hat likewise appears in no contemporaneous source.

Primary: Fort Wayne Sentinel, 22 Mar 1845, p.2, full transcription at ACGSI: acgsi.org

More of the record around the marker. Chapman was born on 26 September 1774 at Leominster, Massachusetts. The Sentinel obituary the file above rests on is transcribed in full on the Genealogical Society's Appleseed page, where the estate papers can be followed document by document. A memorial stone was erected on the traditional site in 1916 — seventy-one years after his death — and the Johnny Appleseed Festival has kept the grave tradition at the centre of its September weekend since the 1970s (that festival's own founding year is its own open question: its history says 1974, the city's parks history says 1975; see the Events record). What the marker marks, then, is where Fort Wayne chose to remember him, on ground his burying ground genuinely occupied — the strongest statement the papers left behind allow.

Added sources: ACGSI, Johnny Appleseed page; Johnny Appleseed Festival official history; City of Fort Wayne Parks & Recreation history

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