December 10, 2025 • 32 mins
Was Johnny Appleseed a real person or just another American tall tale? We get to the core of the issue with author William Kerrigan (Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History) to see how one man's true story inspired an enduring folk legend.
In this episode Bob and William explore how John Chapman's religious revival led him to pioneer apple nurseries across Pennsylvania and Ohio. Just like some hybrid apples, Chapman was a mix of naturalist and capitalist. He bought vast tracts of land for apple orchards but believed in America’s lost simplicity and a connection to nature.
So, kick off your shoes and put a pot on your head as we travel around spreading seeds of knowledge.
GUEST: William Kerrigan, author of Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, I snapped a couple of pictures. I started walking
back downtown Long Meadow, and then a police car came
up and pulled off the road right across the tree line,
across the sidewalk and jumped out, and you said, what
will you do with taking pictures of people's houses? And
I tried to explain to the police officer that, well,
I'm a historian and I'm researching the life of John Chapman,
(00:22):
the real Johnny apple Seed. And the police officer said
to me, you're trying to tell me that Johnny apple
Seed is real. You think I'm that stupid.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, we
get the answers, leave a message. Hey, they are American
History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here, thrilled to be joining you
again for another episode of American History Hotline, the show
where you asked the questions, and if you got a
(00:56):
question about American history, record yourself using the voice memo
apple on your phone and email it to American History
Hotline at gmail dot com. That's American History Hotline at
gmail dot com. Okay, let's get to the show today.
Our guest is William Kerrigan, author of the book Johnny
(01:16):
Appleseed and the American Orchard, a Cultural History. Hey Bill,
how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Today, Bob? I'm doing great. I'm thrilled to be talking
to you, and I'm thrilled to be talking about Johnny Appleseed.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Well, Bill, we brought you on the show today because
we have a question from Mark and Wilmington, Delaware, who
wants to know was Johnny Appleseed a real person? If so,
what did he actually do? So Bill, to set this up,
let's get right to the heart of the question. Was
Johnny Appleseed a real person?
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Okay? Yes, In fact, Johnny Appleseed was a real person.
And I have a little personal story about the stakes
involved in and John Chapman. Was he being a real person?
When I was doing the research for this book, many many,
many years ago, I traced John Chapman's path from Ohio
backwards to Massachusetts and I stopped in the town of
(02:13):
Long Meadow where he was a child. And I got
to town before the town library opened, so I went
for a walk. I was looking for a house that
some locals believed he lived in, and it was pretty
early in the morning. It's beautiful historic town. And I
found the house and I had a big, clunky digital
camera with me. This is before everyone had a camera
(02:34):
on their phone, so I thought, well, I want to
take a picture of this house. I don't want to
disturb the residence this early in the morning, so I'll
just snap a picture and walk back to town. I
snapped a couple of pictures, I started walking back downtown
Long Meadow, and then a police car came up and
pulled off the road right across the tree line, across
the sidewalk and jumped out and he said, what were
(02:56):
you doing taking pictures of people's houses. I felt terrible,
of course, because I'd clearly scared somebody, and I tried
to explain to the police officer that, well, I'm a
historian and i'm researching the life of John Chapman, the
real Johnny Appleseeed, and I have some evidence to suggest
he lived in that house. And I really feel bad
(03:18):
that I didn't just knock on the door and ask
for permission, but I didn't want to disturb them. And
the police officer said to me, you're trying to tell
me that Johnny Appleseed is real. You think I'm that stupid.
So at that moment, I thought, does my freedom depends
on convincing him he's real? But instead I just assured
him that I was very sorry, that I was willing
(03:39):
to go talk to the residents, and that if they
had any questions, I would be in the town library
all day. My car was parked out there and old
red tempo with a bike and a kayak attached to
the top. And he let me go. But yeah, so,
even in a town where Johnny Appleseed spent part of
his childhood, not everyone knew he was real.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Well, yeah, Bill, like, it's well, it's because we grow
up with this idea he's he's this name, and there
is this mythic quality to him. You know, he is
tied in there with Paul Bunyan and and and and
then and Davy Crockett, who hated to be called being
called Davy by the way. Uh, David Crockett and and
(04:24):
uh and Daniel Boone. You know, these are the you know,
some real some fiction fiction attached to the real people
in many cases. So paint us a picture of John Chapman,
Johnny Appleseed, What did he look like?
Speaker 1 (04:41):
You know?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
What was tell us about him.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Okay, so he was. He was about five foot nine,
was pretty skinny and older. In his older years, he
had fairly long hair. The one sketch that survives of
him uh drawn by by an artist who was talking
to a woman who'd known him as a child. To me,
(05:07):
he looks exactly like Jimmy Dale Gilmore. You know Jimmy
Dell Gilmore.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yes, okay, the Great for those who don't know, the
Great Texas Troubadour, A great we would call it American
americanum music. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Yeah, So that's the one image we have a sketch.
And when I first saw that, I almost fell out
of my chair because I could have sworn I was
looking at the picture of Jimmy del Gilmore. But he
was real. His real name was John Chapman. One of
the reasons that I think that people doubt he's real
is he's so his life is so heavily layered in
(05:44):
tall tales and so gilded, and lots of those are
obviously not true stories, and even the ones that have
a grain of truth are often greatly exaggerated. And the
historical records we have of him that prove his existence,
it's a pretty small group of records, so we have
church records indicating when he was born and when was
(06:08):
that bill he was born. He was born in seventeen
seventy four September twenty seconds twenty six, seventeen seventy four
in Leminster, Massachusetts. His father was when a few months
later would be heading off to Lexicon in Concord as
a minuteman. He would his father would would not be
(06:31):
around for most of the first six years of his life.
His mother, during the war, while his father was away,
became pregnant. When she had tuberculosis, She and the baby
both died as a result, and John was raised by
relatives in Lemonster for about the first six years of
(06:52):
his life. In seventeen eighty, his father, Nathaniel Chapman, and
bought six years in the Revolution, which which puts him
in a subset of revolution areas that wanted story and
calls the hardcore. Most people who fought for the revolution,
they fought for a year or two and then they
went back and took care of their businesses and farm farms.
Nathanga Chapman fought for six years and he finally when
(07:15):
he finally got out, he was stationed at the Springfield Armory,
and he had John and possibly his older sister Elizabeth
join him in Long Meadow, which little tiny town south
of Springfield, where he had remarried to a woman named
Lucy Cooley, and they lived in a small house and
they quickly started having more children, and Lucy would eventually
(07:41):
have ten children. And this is a very small house.
So John, who was the oldest step son in this
increasingly crowded house, he probably left home pretty early. In fact,
seventeen ninety census suggests he's no longer in the town.
He's out of that. He's out of the house by
(08:02):
fourteen or fifteen. My guess is he was apprenticed locally.
His father had been apprenticed as a carpenter when he
was fourteen, and it probably followed that that path he
then We don't know much about him in his teen years,
but then he appears starts to appear in records in
(08:23):
northwest Pennsylvania about seventeen ninety six, and he will set
He'll spend six or eight years in northwestern Pennsylvania. He
is at the first place that he has recorded as
having planted apple seeds, but he also was involved in farming.
(08:44):
He was tapping maple trees. He was selling his labor
driving cattle for locals. He was trying to start a homestead.
But this northwestern Pennsylvania frontier at this time was a
really hard place to get a land plan. There were
two different ways you could acquire land. You could go
into a Philadelphia land company office and put money down
(09:09):
on land you've never seen. Or you could go try
to claim land by improvement, get on the land, clear it,
plant an orchard, build a fence, plant some crops, and
then eventually go back. So all of the land titles
there were a mess. There were people who had tried
to acquire the land both ways, and he he was
eventually pushed out of northwestern Pennsylvania, I think because someone
(09:33):
jumped his land claim and he then kind of headed
towards Ohio.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
So, Bill, if a man interrupted, you said earlier that
northwestern Pennsylvania this is where he starts to plant apple seeds.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yes, so what why?
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Like right, this is the big, the big mystery of
this legend, Like what attracted him to the apple and
ed him to plant these seeds?
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Right? So yeah, his years at Northwestern Pennsylvania are the
most interesting to me because the people who knew him there.
He didn't have the nickname Johnny apple Seed yet that
he picked that up later in Ohio. But why plant
apple seeds? Well, one of the ways on the frontier
that you could make a land improvement claim. It varied
(10:26):
from state to state, but one of the ways was
you cleared a certain number of acres of land, you
built a cabin, and you planted, in the case of
parts of Ohio, fifty apple or peach trees. And so
people needed to get those orchards started soon. And an orchard.
It wasn't just for land claims for a frontier family,
(10:48):
for a poor frontier family, an orchard was a way
to help sustain you fairly quickly, especially if you moved
to a place where somebody liked. John Chapman had arrived
a few years earlier and laid out, planted from seed
a lot of trees, and you're buying two to three
(11:08):
year old seedling trees, so you're buying two to three
year head started an orchard. So that was his plan.
What he appeared to do was when he was in
the East, he would go to cider mills and he
would go out behind the cider mill where after the
apples had been cressed, they threw all the pummice that
(11:29):
just a ground up, mashed up fibrous stuff with the
seeds in it, and they the cider mill owner would
give them the seeds for free, and he'd fill them
full of bags, then carry them west and plant them
in little scruffy nurseries, usually along a creep try to
put a kind of primitive brush fence around them to
(11:50):
hopefully keep deer from browsing them. And then as settlers
came in a few years later, he would say, hey,
I've got these nursery seedling trees, to the three year
old trees. I'll sell them to you for one cent
or two cents of peace. And he would give them
the directions, and these people would just go to the
nursery and pick the healthiest looking seedlings and transplant them
(12:13):
into the orchards on their own property. This apple tree
had a lot of uses for Frontier family. If you plant,
do you have a favorite apple?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Bub You know, that's a really great question, Bill. I
appreciate you asking me that. I used to like the
red delicious yep, but I've gotten away from the waxier
apple and I'm fine myself enjoying recently the honey crisp
and the cosmic.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Yes, yes, I'm with you of that. There's a lot
of today. There's a lot of amazing new varieties out.
But the way an apple is propagated is not from seed.
A variety is propagated, So the Red Delicious was a
seedling apple accident. When you plant apple seeds in the
ground and you wait for those trees to grow, most
(13:08):
of them are going to end up producing small, gnarl
ditterer apples. Even if you take your cosmic crisp seed,
it's not going to grow a tree with cosmoscrape apples.
You have to have to graft to propagate those trees.
So Chapman, by planting seedling trees, was planting what Henry
David Barrow called wild apples. And if you were to
(13:32):
plant a hundred of these these trees, most of them
would have apples you would not want to sink your
teeth into, but they still had a lot of use
for you. But by luck of the genetic lottery, one
of those hundred trees in your orchard might have a
really tasty apple that you could eat fresh and making
divies and a standard apple tree could live one hundred
and fifty years and within ten years can produce more
(13:56):
apples every year than a family could use on their own.
The rest of the trees, you could press them into cider,
and you could also convert them to pork. He would
let your hogs into the orchard in the fall as
the apples dropped, and let them fatten themselves on those
apples and then get higher values for them.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
So I planna ask you this Bill. It sounds like
initially his fascination with apples or his it was entrepreneurial. Yes, right,
he was trying to make money. At some point it changes.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Well, yeah, did it change at a certain point or
was it always a little bit of both. There's a
little controversy. So in a lot of the early legends,
they just talked about him giving away apples, and he
was just a he was just a Saint Francis of
a CC character, just helping everybody, and there was a
real part of that. But then a professor at a
(14:51):
little college in Ohio named Robert Price in the nineteen fifties,
he started digging up more documents and he found not
only did he sell apples, but he actual she bought land,
and he had kind of a mask a fair amount
of real estate, and this alternative theory emerged that he
was he was this entrepreneurial businessman, and during the Cold War,
(15:13):
conservatives started to really push that idea that he wouldn't
have given those away. He was a good businessman, he
would have always sold them, and there was a spin
on him as being almost a real estate tycoon. I
sometimes give a talk that's called the Johnny Apples Saint
Francis or Steve Jobs, right, And the truth is he's
a little bit of both. I mean, he's a businessman
(15:35):
in the sense that he has this inspired idea. He
knows there's going to be a market for these trees,
and he knows he anticipates where they're going to be
needed a few years in advance. They starts planting them
all over the place, right, But he knows his audience.
But the reality was he didn't really care much about money.
He spent a lot of the money buying religious tracks.
(15:58):
He was a follower of the Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg
turned to the New Jerusalem. He also was very He
would accept IOUs from people. He'd tell them, oh, here's
where my nursery is. Your two cents apiece, pay me whenever,
And a lot of times he never collected. If he
saw a family that was in dire straits, he wouldn't
(16:19):
even ask him for money. So people said he often
had a lot of money, but he was quick to
give it away, and he didn't spend it on himself.
He continued his whole life to dress in rags and
recycled clothing, to sleep outdoors most of the time. Even
when he accepted indoor accommodation, he preferred to sleep on
the floor. So, yes, he did have a smart business idea,
(16:44):
but he was absolutely not interested in excubulating wealth, and
he gave way much of the money he made, or
spent it proselytizing, or just gave it to poor people
who needed.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
It more so this time period. If I'm not hot,
dirrect me if I'm wrong. Are we talking about the
second grade Awakening?
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Yes? Yes, And so this is a very central part
of understanding who Johnny Applesid was. So chatman back in
Long Meadow when he grew up that town, Long Meadow
in the years after the Revolution, wasn't all that different
than one of the original Puritan towns. It had one church,
(17:29):
one which was also the political meetinghouse. The same minister
had been in the public for sixty years. Everybody was
delivered this one version of what faith was and what
truth was. And then John Chapman walks west, he walks
into Pennsylvania and Ohio, and he encounters this second Great
(17:50):
Awakening world, this world of people professing twenty thirty forty
different faiths, and you could go to camp revivals where
it was it was kind of a spiritual cafeteria, a.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Thinking bill of Charles Finney.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yes, Yes, and all of those revivals. You know, some
of the preachers were very emotional, and they brought people
to conversion through these these very emotional please. A lot
of the religions in the second Grade Awakening were what
I would call heart religions that focused more on touching
(18:26):
the listener's heart. But there were some that were head religions,
and Swedenborgianism or New Church was much more of a
head religion. It was a religion that required you to
read some pretty dense theological works and spend a lot
of time studying them. It was not a typical choice
(18:49):
for a guy who's wandering around Ohio barefoot in rags
to become a proselytizer of New Church doctrine. So he
was he was a the person in that way, but
he was determined to try to win converts to the
New Church wherever he went. And so the New Church
is one of those many, many, many varieties that are
(19:11):
flourishing in the Second Great Awakening, but it's not one
of them that is as successful. The heart religions see
much greater success than the head religions at that time.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
This is American History Hotline. I'm your host Bob Crawford. Today.
My guest is William Kerrigan, author of the book Johnny
Appleseed and the American Orchard Cultural History. We're talking about
the man, the myth, the legend, Johnny Appleseed. And Hey,
do you have questions about American history? If so, send
them our way, record yourself using the voice memo app
(19:50):
on your phone and email it to American History Hotline
at gmail dot com. That's American History Hotline at gmail
dot com. Now back to the show, Bill, I love
what you're like. You're you are illuminating so much about
Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman and the Second grade awakening. Awakening
(20:14):
is a time is very fascinating to me. I've done
a lot of reading about it. I did not I
never connected Johnny Appleseed with this movement. So you're telling
me about a man who is an entrepreneur. He is
also almost like the social Gospel, right. He sounds like
(20:34):
he's trying to use his profession to profess his faith yep,
and to share his faith. And somewhere out of all
of this, a legend is born, a myth, an American
myth is born. Tell me about how that came to be.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
So, yeah, I think it's a very interesting question. Why
did so many stories surround this peculiar individual? And I
think part of the answer to that is to look
at when the stories really started to spread, and the
map to map out the places that John Chapman went to.
(21:18):
When he arrived in northwest Pennsylvania as a young man
living in pretty primitive conditions, the only other European people
there were a lot like him. They were living in
primitive conditions. When he moved into Ohio in the first
years of the nineteenth century. The first places he was
(21:39):
at were mostly still in these frontier settlements, so he
might have seemed a little strange, but this was a
time when you would run into strange people all the time.
When he arrived in Ohio about eighteen oh one, the
first time, there were only forty thousand people in the state.
When he died in eighteen forty five, there's one and
(21:59):
a half a million people in the state. He parks
himself in Ohio for about four decades, and the world
around him starts to change a lot, and he doesn't
change much. So by the time he's an old man,
there are canals and roads and even railroads that are
(22:20):
connecting every town in Ohio to national and international markets.
People have access to nicer clothes, store bought te all
sorts of things. They are becoming consumers, and the lifestyle
of those who had been around had changed for most people.
But John Chapman doesn't change. He's committed to frugality. He's
(22:43):
committed to living with just the most basic needs. He
becomes a symbol of the lost Frontier, and the Americans
are kind of have this ambivalence towards modernity. On one side,
we embrace change and improvement, but then we also have
nostalgia for what was lost in the past and Chapman
(23:07):
becomes an enveering figure because he seems to represent these
these old values of being helpful to your neighbors and
not worrying about striving and getting ahead. And so people
start talking about them, and they start telling stories, and
then they exaggerate those stories as they're passed along, and
they come to be tall tales. I think most of
(23:30):
the tall tales do reflect certain aspects of his actual character,
even if the tale itself is not entirely believable.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Is it true that he was a vegetarian.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Ah, this is a great So he's very commonly called
the vegetarian. Now. When I was doing research in northwest Pennsylvania,
one of my good best sources because he didn't leave
a diet or anything where the dry goods store ledgers
from stores, or he went in and bought things. People
didn't have cash, So you wrote down what you took
(24:05):
and what you might have given an exchange, and sometime
down down the road those accounts would be settled. But
at one entry from a dry goods store in Franklin, Pennsylvania,
the young John Chapman bought gunpowder, pork whiskey, chocolate, had
two pairs of moccasins. So in this one entry was
(24:28):
he was always barefoot. Well, sometimes you he was a vegetarian.
He's got pork, he is buying gunpowder, he carries a gun.
A lot of the the myths of him as never
carried a gun completely vegetarian certainly wasn't true in his
years in Pennsylvania. However, there is a lot of evidence
that he embraced vegetariatism later in life, and he may
(24:52):
have gotten that even through his Swedenborgian faith, because there
was a splinter group of Swedenborgians who who embraced vegetarian
aboutism about that time, so late in life you hit
you hear stories about he hired a young man to
help him do some work clearing land for a nursery,
(25:12):
and when it came lunch, he was expected to provide
lunch for the young man, and he offered the young
man a handful of walnuts for lunch, and this young
man did quit walked off. At that time. That he
wouldn't harm an animal seems to be very true. Sometimes
he took in horses that had no value because they
(25:33):
were so broken down and just cared for them. I
think it is likely that he became a full fledged
vegetarian at some point in his life, but he certainly
didn't start out that way, and I think that's something
he embraced along the way.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
You did reference Saint Francis, yes, and who was very
much a naturalist, right, And so are there these power
like how deep does the parallel go?
Speaker 1 (26:02):
I think the parallels are pretty deep. He did seem
to have extraordinary empathy for all living things at a
time on a frontier where that was very uncommon, And
a lot of the tall tales are about how far
he would go with this. One of the crazier ones
is he was sleeping in the woods on an early
(26:23):
fall day when it's cold out, and he starts a
fire to keep warm, and he notices that mosquitoes are
flying into the flames to their death, and he's so
horrified by this he puts the fire out and shivers
for the night rather than kill mosquitoes. Was he claimed
to have been expressed deep regret for striking a snake
(26:45):
that bid him while he was clearing ground, and then
he did it sort of as a natural reaction and
killed a snake. And then he said, you know, the
snake was just protecting itself, and I feel terrible about
killing the snake. The story about him crawling into a
hollow tree trunk to sleep one night, to discover that
there were some bears in there, and then him leaving
(27:05):
it for the bears. Many of these stories were probably
made up. But I think the point that the tall
tale tellers were making was this guy cared about non
human life in really really extreme ways, and they found
that curious, and maybe they found it just weird, or
maybe they found it endearing.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Before we parted, I got I got two questions for you. First,
in your research, when were the earliest mythic stories like
he dies in eighteen forty five?
Speaker 1 (27:39):
He said, yes, yeah, And so when did.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
You start to see When do we start to see
the telling of Johnny Applesy to the school kids? And
when does the myth begin to take hold? What's he
a living legend?
Speaker 1 (27:56):
No, so he was a local, living legend for during
his life. What's interesting is at the time he dies,
one of the only things that's been written about him
is in a bulletin produced by the Church of the
New Jerusalem in Manchester, England in eighteen seventeen. They already
know him because he is he's sending letters to them,
sending money so they'll send him books to distribute. But
(28:19):
they described in detail that he's planting trees and he's
living this primitive existence and he's proselytizing. That's one of
the very few things that's written about him during his life.
Even in his obituary in eighteen forty five in Fort
Wayne in a Fort Wayne newspaper, they described his life
a little bit, but they don't know where he came from.
(28:41):
There's very little details. One of the most curious thing
that the obituary writer put in there was he was
not less than eighty years old at the time of
his death. Though no person would have judged him from
his appearance that he was sixty, he was in fact
seventy one, so he over aged him, probably because of
his peculiarity in his frontier qualities. But he also seemed
(29:05):
to be acknowledging that he was remarkably fit for somebody
that age. But only after that he died do we
start to see some things coming to print. This young
novelist and writer of fiction named Rosella Rice, who had
known that Johnny Applety when she was a little girl.
(29:27):
She starts to write stories about him. In eighteen seventy one,
a Unitarian minister in Mansfield, Ohio who turned journalists publishes
an article in Harper's Monthly Magazine, which is a national magazine.
That's the first time you get this very national story.
And then in eighteen eighty Lydia Maria Child who wrote
(29:49):
American Trubal Housewife, among other things, and she wrote a
poem that was published in national magazines called Applety John.
And those early accounts are the national story. But then
what also starts happening about the same time is every
county in Ohio starts to publish its own county history,
and the local stories that people have been telling in
(30:11):
their families start to appear in those late nineteenth century
county histories. So they really kind of unfold over a
long period of time. What's really remarkable is how little
actually makes it the print during his lifetime.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
And he but he was referred to during his lifetime
by some as Johnny Appleseed.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yes, no one in northwestern Pennsylvania knew him by that name,
but he was called Johnny Appleseed or Appleseed John. We
do have one document he signed. I think it was
an IOU and he signed it apple Seed John, so
the name had stuck with him that that happened that
emerged in his Ohio years.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Though, Well, Bill, this has been so much fun. I
really enjoyed talking with you today. I've learned a lot.
My last question for you is what is your favorite apple?
Speaker 1 (31:05):
My favorite apple is I like antique apples that are
hard to find. One. It's called the Cox's Orange Pippins,
and it's an old English apple that if you really
haunt places that have heritage apple orchards you might find one.
It actually tastes similar to your cosmic crisp. I would
say I appreciate all kinds of apples, but the Cox's
(31:31):
Orange Pippen, I would have to say, is the best
tasting apple I've ever had.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
William Kerrigan. The book is Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard,
a Cultural History Bill. Thanks for joining us today on
American History Hotline.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Thank you, Bob, I really enjoyed speaking with you.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of
iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show is executive
producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are
Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music composed by me,
(32:12):
Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is Americanhistory
Hotline at gmail dot com. If you like the show,
please tell your friends and leave us a review in
Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to
hit me up on social media to ask a history
question or to let me know what you think of
(32:34):
the show. You can find me at Bob Crawford Base.
Thanks so much for listening, See you next week.
Well, I snapped a couple of pictures. I started walking
back downtown Long Meadow, and then a police car came
up and pulled off the road right across the tree line,
across the sidewalk and jumped out, and you said, what
will you do with taking pictures of people's houses? And
I tried to explain to the police officer that, well,
I'm a historian and I'm researching the life of John Chapman,
(00:22):
the real Johnny apple Seed. And the police officer said
to me, you're trying to tell me that Johnny apple
Seed is real. You think I'm that stupid.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, we
get the answers, leave a message. Hey, they are American
History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here, thrilled to be joining you
again for another episode of American History Hotline, the show
where you asked the questions, and if you got a
(00:56):
question about American history, record yourself using the voice memo
apple on your phone and email it to American History
Hotline at gmail dot com. That's American History Hotline at
gmail dot com. Okay, let's get to the show today.
Our guest is William Kerrigan, author of the book Johnny
(01:16):
Appleseed and the American Orchard, a Cultural History. Hey Bill,
how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Today, Bob? I'm doing great. I'm thrilled to be talking
to you, and I'm thrilled to be talking about Johnny Appleseed.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Well, Bill, we brought you on the show today because
we have a question from Mark and Wilmington, Delaware, who
wants to know was Johnny Appleseed a real person? If so,
what did he actually do? So Bill, to set this up,
let's get right to the heart of the question. Was
Johnny Appleseed a real person?
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Okay? Yes, In fact, Johnny Appleseed was a real person.
And I have a little personal story about the stakes
involved in and John Chapman. Was he being a real person?
When I was doing the research for this book, many many,
many years ago, I traced John Chapman's path from Ohio
backwards to Massachusetts and I stopped in the town of
(02:13):
Long Meadow where he was a child. And I got
to town before the town library opened, so I went
for a walk. I was looking for a house that
some locals believed he lived in, and it was pretty
early in the morning. It's beautiful historic town. And I
found the house and I had a big, clunky digital
camera with me. This is before everyone had a camera
(02:34):
on their phone, so I thought, well, I want to
take a picture of this house. I don't want to
disturb the residence this early in the morning, so I'll
just snap a picture and walk back to town. I
snapped a couple of pictures, I started walking back downtown
Long Meadow, and then a police car came up and
pulled off the road right across the tree line, across
the sidewalk and jumped out and he said, what were
(02:56):
you doing taking pictures of people's houses. I felt terrible,
of course, because I'd clearly scared somebody, and I tried
to explain to the police officer that, well, I'm a
historian and i'm researching the life of John Chapman, the
real Johnny Appleseeed, and I have some evidence to suggest
he lived in that house. And I really feel bad
(03:18):
that I didn't just knock on the door and ask
for permission, but I didn't want to disturb them. And
the police officer said to me, you're trying to tell
me that Johnny Appleseed is real. You think I'm that stupid.
So at that moment, I thought, does my freedom depends
on convincing him he's real? But instead I just assured
him that I was very sorry, that I was willing
(03:39):
to go talk to the residents, and that if they
had any questions, I would be in the town library
all day. My car was parked out there and old
red tempo with a bike and a kayak attached to
the top. And he let me go. But yeah, so,
even in a town where Johnny Appleseed spent part of
his childhood, not everyone knew he was real.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Well, yeah, Bill, like, it's well, it's because we grow
up with this idea he's he's this name, and there
is this mythic quality to him. You know, he is
tied in there with Paul Bunyan and and and and
then and Davy Crockett, who hated to be called being
called Davy by the way. Uh, David Crockett and and
(04:24):
uh and Daniel Boone. You know, these are the you know,
some real some fiction fiction attached to the real people
in many cases. So paint us a picture of John Chapman,
Johnny Appleseed, What did he look like?
Speaker 1 (04:41):
You know?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
What was tell us about him.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Okay, so he was. He was about five foot nine,
was pretty skinny and older. In his older years, he
had fairly long hair. The one sketch that survives of
him uh drawn by by an artist who was talking
to a woman who'd known him as a child. To me,
(05:07):
he looks exactly like Jimmy Dale Gilmore. You know Jimmy
Dell Gilmore.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yes, okay, the Great for those who don't know, the
Great Texas Troubadour, A great we would call it American
americanum music. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Yeah, So that's the one image we have a sketch.
And when I first saw that, I almost fell out
of my chair because I could have sworn I was
looking at the picture of Jimmy del Gilmore. But he
was real. His real name was John Chapman. One of
the reasons that I think that people doubt he's real
is he's so his life is so heavily layered in
(05:44):
tall tales and so gilded, and lots of those are
obviously not true stories, and even the ones that have
a grain of truth are often greatly exaggerated. And the
historical records we have of him that prove his existence,
it's a pretty small group of records, so we have
church records indicating when he was born and when was
(06:08):
that bill he was born. He was born in seventeen
seventy four September twenty seconds twenty six, seventeen seventy four
in Leminster, Massachusetts. His father was when a few months
later would be heading off to Lexicon in Concord as
a minuteman. He would his father would would not be
(06:31):
around for most of the first six years of his life.
His mother, during the war, while his father was away,
became pregnant. When she had tuberculosis, She and the baby
both died as a result, and John was raised by
relatives in Lemonster for about the first six years of
(06:52):
his life. In seventeen eighty, his father, Nathaniel Chapman, and
bought six years in the Revolution, which which puts him
in a subset of revolution areas that wanted story and
calls the hardcore. Most people who fought for the revolution,
they fought for a year or two and then they
went back and took care of their businesses and farm farms.
Nathanga Chapman fought for six years and he finally when
(07:15):
he finally got out, he was stationed at the Springfield Armory,
and he had John and possibly his older sister Elizabeth
join him in Long Meadow, which little tiny town south
of Springfield, where he had remarried to a woman named
Lucy Cooley, and they lived in a small house and
they quickly started having more children, and Lucy would eventually
(07:41):
have ten children. And this is a very small house.
So John, who was the oldest step son in this
increasingly crowded house, he probably left home pretty early. In fact,
seventeen ninety census suggests he's no longer in the town.
He's out of that. He's out of the house by
(08:02):
fourteen or fifteen. My guess is he was apprenticed locally.
His father had been apprenticed as a carpenter when he
was fourteen, and it probably followed that that path he
then We don't know much about him in his teen years,
but then he appears starts to appear in records in
(08:23):
northwest Pennsylvania about seventeen ninety six, and he will set
He'll spend six or eight years in northwestern Pennsylvania. He
is at the first place that he has recorded as
having planted apple seeds, but he also was involved in farming.
(08:44):
He was tapping maple trees. He was selling his labor
driving cattle for locals. He was trying to start a homestead.
But this northwestern Pennsylvania frontier at this time was a
really hard place to get a land plan. There were
two different ways you could acquire land. You could go
into a Philadelphia land company office and put money down
(09:09):
on land you've never seen. Or you could go try
to claim land by improvement, get on the land, clear it,
plant an orchard, build a fence, plant some crops, and
then eventually go back. So all of the land titles
there were a mess. There were people who had tried
to acquire the land both ways, and he he was
eventually pushed out of northwestern Pennsylvania, I think because someone
(09:33):
jumped his land claim and he then kind of headed
towards Ohio.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
So, Bill, if a man interrupted, you said earlier that
northwestern Pennsylvania this is where he starts to plant apple seeds.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yes, so what why?
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Like right, this is the big, the big mystery of
this legend, Like what attracted him to the apple and
ed him to plant these seeds?
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Right? So yeah, his years at Northwestern Pennsylvania are the
most interesting to me because the people who knew him there.
He didn't have the nickname Johnny apple Seed yet that
he picked that up later in Ohio. But why plant
apple seeds? Well, one of the ways on the frontier
that you could make a land improvement claim. It varied
(10:26):
from state to state, but one of the ways was
you cleared a certain number of acres of land, you
built a cabin, and you planted, in the case of
parts of Ohio, fifty apple or peach trees. And so
people needed to get those orchards started soon. And an orchard.
It wasn't just for land claims for a frontier family,
(10:48):
for a poor frontier family, an orchard was a way
to help sustain you fairly quickly, especially if you moved
to a place where somebody liked. John Chapman had arrived
a few years earlier and laid out, planted from seed
a lot of trees, and you're buying two to three
(11:08):
year old seedling trees, so you're buying two to three
year head started an orchard. So that was his plan.
What he appeared to do was when he was in
the East, he would go to cider mills and he
would go out behind the cider mill where after the
apples had been cressed, they threw all the pummice that
(11:29):
just a ground up, mashed up fibrous stuff with the
seeds in it, and they the cider mill owner would
give them the seeds for free, and he'd fill them
full of bags, then carry them west and plant them
in little scruffy nurseries, usually along a creep try to
put a kind of primitive brush fence around them to
(11:50):
hopefully keep deer from browsing them. And then as settlers
came in a few years later, he would say, hey,
I've got these nursery seedling trees, to the three year
old trees. I'll sell them to you for one cent
or two cents of peace. And he would give them
the directions, and these people would just go to the
nursery and pick the healthiest looking seedlings and transplant them
(12:13):
into the orchards on their own property. This apple tree
had a lot of uses for Frontier family. If you plant,
do you have a favorite apple?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Bub You know, that's a really great question, Bill. I
appreciate you asking me that. I used to like the
red delicious yep, but I've gotten away from the waxier
apple and I'm fine myself enjoying recently the honey crisp
and the cosmic.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Yes, yes, I'm with you of that. There's a lot
of today. There's a lot of amazing new varieties out.
But the way an apple is propagated is not from seed.
A variety is propagated, So the Red Delicious was a
seedling apple accident. When you plant apple seeds in the
ground and you wait for those trees to grow, most
(13:08):
of them are going to end up producing small, gnarl
ditterer apples. Even if you take your cosmic crisp seed,
it's not going to grow a tree with cosmoscrape apples.
You have to have to graft to propagate those trees.
So Chapman, by planting seedling trees, was planting what Henry
David Barrow called wild apples. And if you were to
(13:32):
plant a hundred of these these trees, most of them
would have apples you would not want to sink your
teeth into, but they still had a lot of use
for you. But by luck of the genetic lottery, one
of those hundred trees in your orchard might have a
really tasty apple that you could eat fresh and making
divies and a standard apple tree could live one hundred
and fifty years and within ten years can produce more
(13:56):
apples every year than a family could use on their own.
The rest of the trees, you could press them into cider,
and you could also convert them to pork. He would
let your hogs into the orchard in the fall as
the apples dropped, and let them fatten themselves on those
apples and then get higher values for them.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
So I planna ask you this Bill. It sounds like
initially his fascination with apples or his it was entrepreneurial. Yes, right,
he was trying to make money. At some point it changes.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Well, yeah, did it change at a certain point or
was it always a little bit of both. There's a
little controversy. So in a lot of the early legends,
they just talked about him giving away apples, and he
was just a he was just a Saint Francis of
a CC character, just helping everybody, and there was a
real part of that. But then a professor at a
(14:51):
little college in Ohio named Robert Price in the nineteen fifties,
he started digging up more documents and he found not
only did he sell apples, but he actual she bought land,
and he had kind of a mask a fair amount
of real estate, and this alternative theory emerged that he
was he was this entrepreneurial businessman, and during the Cold War,
(15:13):
conservatives started to really push that idea that he wouldn't
have given those away. He was a good businessman, he
would have always sold them, and there was a spin
on him as being almost a real estate tycoon. I
sometimes give a talk that's called the Johnny Apples Saint
Francis or Steve Jobs, right, And the truth is he's
a little bit of both. I mean, he's a businessman
(15:35):
in the sense that he has this inspired idea. He
knows there's going to be a market for these trees,
and he knows he anticipates where they're going to be
needed a few years in advance. They starts planting them
all over the place, right, But he knows his audience.
But the reality was he didn't really care much about money.
He spent a lot of the money buying religious tracks.
(15:58):
He was a follower of the Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg
turned to the New Jerusalem. He also was very He
would accept IOUs from people. He'd tell them, oh, here's
where my nursery is. Your two cents apiece, pay me whenever,
And a lot of times he never collected. If he
saw a family that was in dire straits, he wouldn't
(16:19):
even ask him for money. So people said he often
had a lot of money, but he was quick to
give it away, and he didn't spend it on himself.
He continued his whole life to dress in rags and
recycled clothing, to sleep outdoors most of the time. Even
when he accepted indoor accommodation, he preferred to sleep on
the floor. So, yes, he did have a smart business idea,
(16:44):
but he was absolutely not interested in excubulating wealth, and
he gave way much of the money he made, or
spent it proselytizing, or just gave it to poor people
who needed.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
It more so this time period. If I'm not hot,
dirrect me if I'm wrong. Are we talking about the
second grade Awakening?
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Yes? Yes, And so this is a very central part
of understanding who Johnny Applesid was. So chatman back in
Long Meadow when he grew up that town, Long Meadow
in the years after the Revolution, wasn't all that different
than one of the original Puritan towns. It had one church,
(17:29):
one which was also the political meetinghouse. The same minister
had been in the public for sixty years. Everybody was
delivered this one version of what faith was and what
truth was. And then John Chapman walks west, he walks
into Pennsylvania and Ohio, and he encounters this second Great
(17:50):
Awakening world, this world of people professing twenty thirty forty
different faiths, and you could go to camp revivals where
it was it was kind of a spiritual cafeteria, a.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Thinking bill of Charles Finney.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yes, Yes, and all of those revivals. You know, some
of the preachers were very emotional, and they brought people
to conversion through these these very emotional please. A lot
of the religions in the second Grade Awakening were what
I would call heart religions that focused more on touching
(18:26):
the listener's heart. But there were some that were head religions,
and Swedenborgianism or New Church was much more of a
head religion. It was a religion that required you to
read some pretty dense theological works and spend a lot
of time studying them. It was not a typical choice
(18:49):
for a guy who's wandering around Ohio barefoot in rags
to become a proselytizer of New Church doctrine. So he
was he was a the person in that way, but
he was determined to try to win converts to the
New Church wherever he went. And so the New Church
is one of those many, many, many varieties that are
(19:11):
flourishing in the Second Great Awakening, but it's not one
of them that is as successful. The heart religions see
much greater success than the head religions at that time.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
This is American History Hotline. I'm your host Bob Crawford. Today.
My guest is William Kerrigan, author of the book Johnny
Appleseed and the American Orchard Cultural History. We're talking about
the man, the myth, the legend, Johnny Appleseed. And Hey,
do you have questions about American history? If so, send
them our way, record yourself using the voice memo app
(19:50):
on your phone and email it to American History Hotline
at gmail dot com. That's American History Hotline at gmail
dot com. Now back to the show, Bill, I love
what you're like. You're you are illuminating so much about
Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman and the Second grade awakening. Awakening
(20:14):
is a time is very fascinating to me. I've done
a lot of reading about it. I did not I
never connected Johnny Appleseed with this movement. So you're telling
me about a man who is an entrepreneur. He is
also almost like the social Gospel, right. He sounds like
(20:34):
he's trying to use his profession to profess his faith yep,
and to share his faith. And somewhere out of all
of this, a legend is born, a myth, an American
myth is born. Tell me about how that came to be.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
So, yeah, I think it's a very interesting question. Why
did so many stories surround this peculiar individual? And I
think part of the answer to that is to look
at when the stories really started to spread, and the
map to map out the places that John Chapman went to.
(21:18):
When he arrived in northwest Pennsylvania as a young man
living in pretty primitive conditions, the only other European people
there were a lot like him. They were living in
primitive conditions. When he moved into Ohio in the first
years of the nineteenth century. The first places he was
(21:39):
at were mostly still in these frontier settlements, so he
might have seemed a little strange, but this was a
time when you would run into strange people all the time.
When he arrived in Ohio about eighteen oh one, the
first time, there were only forty thousand people in the state.
When he died in eighteen forty five, there's one and
(21:59):
a half a million people in the state. He parks
himself in Ohio for about four decades, and the world
around him starts to change a lot, and he doesn't
change much. So by the time he's an old man,
there are canals and roads and even railroads that are
(22:20):
connecting every town in Ohio to national and international markets.
People have access to nicer clothes, store bought te all
sorts of things. They are becoming consumers, and the lifestyle
of those who had been around had changed for most people.
But John Chapman doesn't change. He's committed to frugality. He's
(22:43):
committed to living with just the most basic needs. He
becomes a symbol of the lost Frontier, and the Americans
are kind of have this ambivalence towards modernity. On one side,
we embrace change and improvement, but then we also have
nostalgia for what was lost in the past and Chapman
(23:07):
becomes an enveering figure because he seems to represent these
these old values of being helpful to your neighbors and
not worrying about striving and getting ahead. And so people
start talking about them, and they start telling stories, and
then they exaggerate those stories as they're passed along, and
they come to be tall tales. I think most of
(23:30):
the tall tales do reflect certain aspects of his actual character,
even if the tale itself is not entirely believable.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Is it true that he was a vegetarian.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Ah, this is a great So he's very commonly called
the vegetarian. Now. When I was doing research in northwest Pennsylvania,
one of my good best sources because he didn't leave
a diet or anything where the dry goods store ledgers
from stores, or he went in and bought things. People
didn't have cash, So you wrote down what you took
(24:05):
and what you might have given an exchange, and sometime
down down the road those accounts would be settled. But
at one entry from a dry goods store in Franklin, Pennsylvania,
the young John Chapman bought gunpowder, pork whiskey, chocolate, had
two pairs of moccasins. So in this one entry was
(24:28):
he was always barefoot. Well, sometimes you he was a vegetarian.
He's got pork, he is buying gunpowder, he carries a gun.
A lot of the the myths of him as never
carried a gun completely vegetarian certainly wasn't true in his
years in Pennsylvania. However, there is a lot of evidence
that he embraced vegetariatism later in life, and he may
(24:52):
have gotten that even through his Swedenborgian faith, because there
was a splinter group of Swedenborgians who who embraced vegetarian
aboutism about that time, so late in life you hit
you hear stories about he hired a young man to
help him do some work clearing land for a nursery,
(25:12):
and when it came lunch, he was expected to provide
lunch for the young man, and he offered the young
man a handful of walnuts for lunch, and this young
man did quit walked off. At that time. That he
wouldn't harm an animal seems to be very true. Sometimes
he took in horses that had no value because they
(25:33):
were so broken down and just cared for them. I
think it is likely that he became a full fledged
vegetarian at some point in his life, but he certainly
didn't start out that way, and I think that's something
he embraced along the way.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
You did reference Saint Francis, yes, and who was very
much a naturalist, right, And so are there these power
like how deep does the parallel go?
Speaker 1 (26:02):
I think the parallels are pretty deep. He did seem
to have extraordinary empathy for all living things at a
time on a frontier where that was very uncommon, And
a lot of the tall tales are about how far
he would go with this. One of the crazier ones
is he was sleeping in the woods on an early
(26:23):
fall day when it's cold out, and he starts a
fire to keep warm, and he notices that mosquitoes are
flying into the flames to their death, and he's so
horrified by this he puts the fire out and shivers
for the night rather than kill mosquitoes. Was he claimed
to have been expressed deep regret for striking a snake
(26:45):
that bid him while he was clearing ground, and then
he did it sort of as a natural reaction and
killed a snake. And then he said, you know, the
snake was just protecting itself, and I feel terrible about
killing the snake. The story about him crawling into a
hollow tree trunk to sleep one night, to discover that
there were some bears in there, and then him leaving
(27:05):
it for the bears. Many of these stories were probably
made up. But I think the point that the tall
tale tellers were making was this guy cared about non
human life in really really extreme ways, and they found
that curious, and maybe they found it just weird, or
maybe they found it endearing.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Before we parted, I got I got two questions for you. First,
in your research, when were the earliest mythic stories like
he dies in eighteen forty five?
Speaker 1 (27:39):
He said, yes, yeah, And so when did.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
You start to see When do we start to see
the telling of Johnny Applesy to the school kids? And
when does the myth begin to take hold? What's he
a living legend?
Speaker 1 (27:56):
No, so he was a local, living legend for during
his life. What's interesting is at the time he dies,
one of the only things that's been written about him
is in a bulletin produced by the Church of the
New Jerusalem in Manchester, England in eighteen seventeen. They already
know him because he is he's sending letters to them,
sending money so they'll send him books to distribute. But
(28:19):
they described in detail that he's planting trees and he's
living this primitive existence and he's proselytizing. That's one of
the very few things that's written about him during his life.
Even in his obituary in eighteen forty five in Fort
Wayne in a Fort Wayne newspaper, they described his life
a little bit, but they don't know where he came from.
(28:41):
There's very little details. One of the most curious thing
that the obituary writer put in there was he was
not less than eighty years old at the time of
his death. Though no person would have judged him from
his appearance that he was sixty, he was in fact
seventy one, so he over aged him, probably because of
his peculiarity in his frontier qualities. But he also seemed
(29:05):
to be acknowledging that he was remarkably fit for somebody
that age. But only after that he died do we
start to see some things coming to print. This young
novelist and writer of fiction named Rosella Rice, who had
known that Johnny Applety when she was a little girl.
(29:27):
She starts to write stories about him. In eighteen seventy one,
a Unitarian minister in Mansfield, Ohio who turned journalists publishes
an article in Harper's Monthly Magazine, which is a national magazine.
That's the first time you get this very national story.
And then in eighteen eighty Lydia Maria Child who wrote
(29:49):
American Trubal Housewife, among other things, and she wrote a
poem that was published in national magazines called Applety John.
And those early accounts are the national story. But then
what also starts happening about the same time is every
county in Ohio starts to publish its own county history,
and the local stories that people have been telling in
(30:11):
their families start to appear in those late nineteenth century
county histories. So they really kind of unfold over a
long period of time. What's really remarkable is how little
actually makes it the print during his lifetime.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
And he but he was referred to during his lifetime
by some as Johnny Appleseed.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yes, no one in northwestern Pennsylvania knew him by that name,
but he was called Johnny Appleseed or Appleseed John. We
do have one document he signed. I think it was
an IOU and he signed it apple Seed John, so
the name had stuck with him that that happened that
emerged in his Ohio years.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Though, Well, Bill, this has been so much fun. I
really enjoyed talking with you today. I've learned a lot.
My last question for you is what is your favorite apple?
Speaker 1 (31:05):
My favorite apple is I like antique apples that are
hard to find. One. It's called the Cox's Orange Pippins,
and it's an old English apple that if you really
haunt places that have heritage apple orchards you might find one.
It actually tastes similar to your cosmic crisp. I would
say I appreciate all kinds of apples, but the Cox's
(31:31):
Orange Pippen, I would have to say, is the best
tasting apple I've ever had.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
William Kerrigan. The book is Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard,
a Cultural History Bill. Thanks for joining us today on
American History Hotline.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Thank you, Bob, I really enjoyed speaking with you.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of
iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show is executive
producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are
Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music composed by me,
(32:12):
Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is Americanhistory
Hotline at gmail dot com. If you like the show,
please tell your friends and leave us a review in
Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to
hit me up on social media to ask a history
question or to let me know what you think of
(32:34):
the show. You can find me at Bob Crawford Base.
Thanks so much for listening, See you next week.
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