In 1800, the census counted 5.3 million people in the United States. Pennsylvania was getting too crowded to suit Johnny.
When he was twenty-six, he led a horse across the Pennsylvania border into Ohio. It was carrying a load of apple seeds. He planted his first Ohio orchard near the town of Carrollton. He would plant many more orchards in north and central Ohio.
At this time, most of Ohio was still a forested wilderness full of bears and other wild animals. Not many people lived there, and the ones who did were rough and wild. Johnny had grown up in the colonies, so he stood out among these men. Even though he wasn’t like them, he seemed to enjoy their company.
Johnny still went back to Pennsylvania cider mills to get seeds in the following years. Once, he tied two canoes together and filled them with apple seeds and supplies and traveled home by river.
Many stories of this time involve Johnny surprising settlers by suddenly popping out of the woods. Sometimes he seemed to appear out of nowhere to say hello. At other times, he warned them of hostile Native Americans nearby.
The new United States government had decided that an area could become a state when its population reached sixty thousand. In 1803 Ohio became the seventeenth state. Johnny realized that central Ohio would become a major pathway for pioneers settling in the area and farther west. He began to focus on his Ohio orchards.
This ability to envision the future is what made Johnny so important in the history of American settlement. He had a knack for figuring out where people were going to move to next. Before a big rush of people went to a new area, he somehow got there first and planted apple trees.
Other farmers gathered apple seeds from cider mills just as Johnny did. They planted orchards in the frontier, too. But most of them settled down next to their orchards. They built homes and began families. Johnny stayed on the move, planting as he went. Over the years, he planted many orchards spread over three states. No one else did that.
The new Ohio state government began offering small areas of land for sale. When Johnny turned thirty-five, he had saved enough money to buy some. This was the first land he ever bought.
Johnny told his father about the rich farmland in Ohio. In 1805 his father moved the family to Ohio, settling near Marietta. Johnny didn’t live with them. Marietta had been around for a while and already had enough orchards.
The Ohio Company wanted settlers to buy land in Ohio and stay there. So they made a rule. Settlers had to plant fifty apple trees and twenty peach trees on every one hundred acres of land they bought. The company believed that settlers would be likely to stay once they had done so much work on a piece of land.
This rule was a lucky break for Johnny Appleseed. Ohio settlers were in a hurry to plant orchards. They were anxious to buy his seedlings. |