Curator's Choice

Episode 60: Johnny Appleseed Museum

• Ayla Anderson • Episode 60

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In this episode, we take a deep dive into the real story of Johnny Appleseed—exploring the man behind the myth. Was he truly the eccentric figure who wore a tin pot as a hat? How did his Swedenborgian faith influence his life's mission? We uncover the origins of this small religious sect, examining Johnny's unique spiritual path and his role in shaping the American frontier.

 🍏 Unveiling Johnny Appleseed: Myths, Faith, and Apples 🌱
We discuss Johnny Appleseed's nonlinear journey as an entrepreneur and his deep connection to the Swedenborgian Bible, which guided him in planting apple orchards for pioneers expanding westward in pursuit of Manifest Destiny. The episode also explores how these orchards helped support the westward expansion and highlights a special pewter spoon—diving into its historical significance and how even small, everyday objects can tell powerful stories of the past.

🔗 Episode Links
Johnny Appleseed Education Center and Museum: https://www.johnnyappleseedmuseum.org/

Delights of Wisdom Concerning Conjugial Love: After which Follow Pleasures of Insanity Concerning Scortatory Love, by Emanuel Swedenborg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11248

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Curator's Choice - A podcast for history nerds and museum lovers

Ayla Sparks:

the apples that he was growing. They weren't the sweeter kind of apples, they were the more tart apples that really you would only use to make alcohol. And so this article was calling him the American Dionysus, because really he was not just supplying apples, it was more of he was supplying alcohol to the American West. Is there any reality to that? Hi, I'm Ayla Sparks, and this is Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers. From ancient relics to modern marvels, each episode of this show features a new museum and a curator's choice of some amazing artifacts housed there. These guardians of history will share insights, anecdotes and the often untold stories that breathe life into the artifacts they protect. Thanks for tuning in to this Mighty Oak Media production and enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of Curator's Choice.

Ayla Sparks:

Today on the show, we're at the Johnny Appleseed Education Center and Museum in Urbana, ohio. With Michaela Prescott as our guide, we'll be exploring the man, the possible myths and the apple legend himself, john Chapman. Join us as we explore the life of this apple orchard entrepreneur and his often omitted missionary work, done in the name of the Swedenborgian faith. Who was he really? Tin hat or no? Tin hat, barefoot man walking through the woods or brilliant-minded apple orchardist. A small disclaimer for this episode a historical text will be discussed which includes mention of certain conjugal relations. So listener discretion is advised. So without further ado, let's jump right in with Mikayla. Have you always been in love with Johnny Appleseed?

Mikaela Prescott:

Oh, absolutely not so. I grew up in the central Pennsylvania area, so Johnny Appleseed was a thing, but his existence was pretty much. We had a Johnny Appleseed day in school growing up, I remember having one of those.

Mikaela Prescott:

Yeah, what that equated to was we got to eat sliced apples and peanut butter, and we usually did a craft where, like, we colored in the tin pot hat and stapled it to like a headband. That was it. He was never contextualized beyond that. This is like my favorite thing. When we get tours in, I always ask them what feels like dumb questions have you ever heard of him? You know those sorts of things. And more and more I'm seeing especially like younger groups are like oh, he's not a real person. And then they get really embarrassed and I'm like no, he's a real person.

Ayla Sparks:

And part of that for me is I like to soothe their fears and be like I did not know he was a real person until I was in college. But to be fair, I mean Johnny Appleseed really is kind of. He's got like a real myth and legend aura about him. Right, a tin saucepan on his head running around planting seeds in the American Manifest Destiny, like it just seems like it would fit really well that it's one of our urban legends.

Mikaela Prescott:

Yeah, he does fit super well within urban legends. He's even gone so far as, in the book American Gods by Neil Gaiman, he's mentioned, amongst other gods of antiquity, as like an American god as a member of our religious ranks. That adds fuel to the fire in this sort of idea that he's not a real person, especially when he's getting categorized with Paul Bunyan. Was Paul Bunyan real? I'm sure there was a cool guy at some point who was really strong and did cut down trees. Did he have a blue ox? Was he pulling up railroads or whatever he was doing?

Mikaela Prescott:

Don't ruin this for me, but Johnny Appleseed gets lumped into that same category for me, but Johnny Appleseed gets lumped into that same category. The largest part of what we do in the museum is sort of untangling, that we're not as concerned with forcing people to remember. Johnny Appleseed's real name was John Chapman. He was born September 26, 1770. We're not as concerned with people remembering those hard dates and sacks so much as we really want them to go to the museum and leave with a better understanding of how history gets done, using those critical thinking skills.

Mikaela Prescott:

When I tell you you know the source of this story, this thing we've always believed came from someone who was seven years old. How does that frame your understanding of this source? Are you sure you want to trust it the whole way? So that's sort of our bigger goal in our education less to make you memorize his siblings' names and memorize every town he stopped in, so much as okay. So why did I come here thinking this wasn't a real person and how can I sort of use my knowledge better in the future? How did we go from this guy who was very much of his life and times and era and an incredible person? But the apple thing is really sort of the least interesting thing about him to that's a hundred years after his death in the 1930s and 40s, there's a sudden explosion in interest of this homeless vagabond, no shoes, throwing apple seeds, pet wolf pot hat. He just sort of comes out of nowhere. A hundred years after his death, suddenly, overnight, he goes from being no one to being this folk hero.

Ayla Sparks:

It's really rewarding. Well, so now that we've established he absolutely existed and at one point in time he was a seven-year-old and a 14-year-old and a 30-year-old. So who was Johnny Appleseed? Brief history of this guy's life.

Mikaela Prescott:

Yeah, I'll run you through like the most bare bones crash course. So, johnny Appleseed, real name John Chapman. He's born September 26th 1774 in Lemonster, massachusetts. That makes, at the time of recording this. Next month would have been his 250th birthday. Oh wow. He's born to his mother Elizabeth and his father Nathaniel. His mother dies when he's very young.

Mikaela Prescott:

His father remarries, has a bunch more kids, and so John Chaffman, being a bit, you know, not quite involved with the family at this point, as a young man, goes to Pennsylvania, he leaves Massachusetts and he walks through New York and into Pennsylvania. Most importantly, he stops in the Pittsburgh area and this is where he learns the two sort of pillars of his personhood, which is he learns the trade of orcharding and he learns about his Swedenborgian religion. This is where he's sort of introduced to his religion, religion. This is where he's sort of introduced to his religion. Now, when we're talking about this character everybody knows and loves, we come away with this idea that he just eats apples because he likes them and he's spitting seeds and doesn't realize there's a forest growing behind him everywhere he goes. Not at all. He was very deliberate. He was incredibly deliberate. He was actually a quite intelligent businessman when we consider the US government essentially is saying hey, soldiers, we can't pay you with money, but what we can pay you with is all this territory we just won, again in loose quotes. There they believed they had won fair and square. And so they're rewarding these plots of lands with the stipulation that people need to have apple trees on it especially. And so we're actually interacting with a very brave and intelligent character. You can see the writing on the wall and says in another decade's time, the hottest item on the market is about to be apples. So if I'm there first and I'm planting before everyone else, guess who's going to need me? Everyone.

Mikaela Prescott:

So essentially, the large big picture of Johnny Appleseed in the legend does take place in Ohio. He spent about 20 to 30 years of his life circulating around the Ohio area. It's debatable about whether or not he jumped over into the West Virginia area, into the Kentucky area, but he definitely crossed back and forth in the Pittsburgh area, all around Ohio for 20 to 30 years, hitting about every corner of the state before finally, like Ohio's pretty well done, and he moves into the Indiana area and he doesn't make it very far before he passes away in Fort Wayne, indiana, March 18, 1845. So that's sort of a crash course in this historical figure and what you really need to know is also, along the way he's not only doing the Apple thing, he is spreading his religion, swedenborgianism, which I touched on. He was introduced to this in the area of Pittsburgh. That's another part of him that gets left behind in the grander mythos. If we look at Walt Disney's behind in the grander mythos, if we look at Walt Disney's Melody Time, which was a short film, a lot of people recall it like mandala effect, recall it being a full-length film. It wasn't, it was just like 18 minutes long.

Mikaela Prescott:

About Johnny Appleseed is. They touch on the fact that he's religious, he has a guardian angel, but they conveniently sort of neglect to mention what that religion is or what that means to him. But when we're looking at John Chapman and studying him, he's really devout in his religion not very well understood, complex religion and introducing it into the state of Ohio and sort of making it digestible, because Swedenborgianism is a really complex religion that had new ideas. It was opening a lot of doors, it was very strange, and so he's planting apple trees and also bringing the sort of fringe, strange religion into pockets of remote Ohio, which is just, it's just fascinating. Like I said, it's. The apple thing is actually not very interesting at all when we consider all this. He was just that was just a good business plan to do apples, but for some reason that's the thing we sort of keep up with in modern times is like he did the pot hat thing and he had apples, and the pot hat thing isn't even true.

Ayla Sparks:

Wasn't it? The only record that we really have of that is one person wrote it down after meeting him at one point. She was an author and wrote an article and put that in the article and that's where everyone else got their information about the pot hat from.

Mikaela Prescott:

Yeah, so pretty much the pot hat thing is. It's very strange. We sort of track it down. I have my own theory about this. This podcast might get people ruffled. I don't know. This is still very hotly debated in Johnny Appleseed fan circles. Is pot hat or not pot hat?

Mikaela Prescott:

What we do know is he was a really big storyteller. There are many records where he loved interacting with kids and telling them stories about the wilderness and all of his adventures and sort of doing anything he could to get them to laugh giving them ribbons for his hair, poking his feet with needles just to sort of entertain them. It is incredibly possible at one point in time he put a pot on his head and and for some reason that's the thing that sticks. But when we're actually looking at, like, oh, this is what he was doing all the time, I'm so sorry to report that like we don't really have any record of that. The only record we have when they talk about his headgear is Rosella Rice, who's a girl living in the Mansfield Ohio area. She knew Johnny quite well. He planted for her grandparents and her parents, so he was living on their property for a good number of years. She talks about him wearing a pasteboard hat, which is similar modern idea cardboard, and what she describes is actually kind of the modern day baseball hat.

Mikaela Prescott:

So in my mind it's actually way more interesting to think about this character in the early 1800s wearing a baseball cap that he made, but I'm not the one who got to decide which part stuck. It would bring a lot more images to mind when we think about this pot hat, but probably not true. This is something that just gets said sort of offhanded once and then gets passed around forever in the course of the legend. People are trying to find ways to make that make sense and sort of rationalize it. He wore a pot on his head because he was kicked in the head by a horse when he was young and this was something about trepanning, holding his brain together.

Mikaela Prescott:

Well, he was wearing the tin pot on his head to protect his head from apples that were falling in the orchard. If he's planting them from seed, he's probably not spending a whole lot of time getting hit in the head with apples. Well, it keeps the sun out of his eyes. If that pot on the head is what makes someone remember love, invest in and uplift this history, then you can keep your pot hat Like. If that's the thing that it takes to get you interested in history, and local history especially, then keep it.

Ayla Sparks:

That's fine. Chapman himself he was obviously a missionary, he was a nurseryman or a portraitist. Maybe we could even say he was really really big into nature, a conservationist. He was also a vegetarian.

Mikaela Prescott:

Okay, so this is another one of those tricky traps that sort of is confusing.

Mikaela Prescott:

So when we're talking about conservationist, we sort of have to wonder what that means and we sort of we have the duty of always meeting people where they're at when looking at biographical figures as people in their era and of their time. One of these challenges, when we sort of label him a conservationist and we think about our 21st century idea of you know, chain yourself to the oak tree on campus so they don't cut it down. You know, recycle all your plastics and your aluminum cans and turn off your water, and not really. Chapman actually makes a lot of money on the side logging for people, because this was one of the things you needed to do to claim your land was making improvements, which was sort of a big catch-all term, and one of the ways you could achieve that goal is clearing out old growth forests for your orchards and for cattle, making fences, things like this. So when we're talking about conservationists, it's really dangerous to lump him into that idea of world-class environmentalist by today's standards. But if we want to speak about him as a figure who he's not interested in building apartment complexes in the woods if that's what we're talking about he meets that bare minimum quality and he isn't interested in indigenous warfare, he's not interested in seeing indigenous people removed from their lands.

Mikaela Prescott:

He is a vegetarian asterisk, which is to say he was eating what people offered him. So if he was offered ye old burger, ye old timey burger, he would eat it. But he wasn't known for going hunting on his own. We know he bought a gun. We know he bought gunpowder. We have receipts that prove this. But we also have these firsthand accounts that date to him saying you know, well, I have to have a gun because I'm walking around in the woods. But he didn't feel like he had the liberty to take the life of a creature. It goes back to those very strict religious beliefs. He believed that God was in everything, and that included animals, which meant he didn't really feel like it was his decision or call to go hunting and take the life of something if God intended for that creature to be wild and free and living. So conservationist by modern day standards maybe not, but still sort of anachronistic within his own time period and people's understanding. So therefore unique.

Ayla Sparks:

Absolutely and it sounds a lot more like conservationist. Back then was more of nature lover and nature prefer.

Mikaela Prescott:

And we again also have to look at that as like we're looking at all these different folks motivations to moving out west, getting their own land. It was rough living, it's hard work, it's sweaty work, it's heavy labor and it's not for everyone just as comfortable, if not more comfortable, with this sort of nomadic lifestyle, camping out, living in the woods, squatting on lands, living in people's barns or sheds or cellars for a hot minute. It is very interesting. It's like that one friend you have at college who's always traveling somehow and you're like how are you always in a hostel over in Japan and then next week camping in Saskatchewan? Like, how do you do that?

Mikaela Prescott:

It does take a very certain interesting personality, I think, to be of that sort of be totally at ease even though you don't have a place to return to at home, sort of no home base. It is very fascinating to me that he never has a home where we can say, oh, john Chapman lived here and here was his address and here was his house. He was living with whoever he was planting for. He was living with his half sister and her husband for a while. So it is a very interesting person that I can see why he would sort of cut a sort of familiar form that people would recall him so many years later.

Ayla Sparks:

I comprehend it Well, in continuing on with this idea, that we have a lot of thoughts about Johnny Appleseed the tin hat and running around barefoot, which apparently he did run around barefoot, but not because he just wanted to feel the dirt on his feet, he was just kind of this you know conservationist nomad.

Ayla Sparks:

But the idea of him just walking and spitting apple seeds also is very inaccurate. As we had mentioned earlier, he was a nursery man, so the way that he was able to kind of be an entrepreneur in this new, burgeoning apple orchard space was by creating these nurseries. How did he go about making these successful?

Mikaela Prescott:

Yeah. So here's another thing that people leave out of the story. He is buying and claiming parcels of land in Ohio especially. So the way he's getting started is he's crossing back over into that Pittsburgh area which is where I said he first encountered the orcharding orchardist sort of hobby or career path. We believe we've got it narrowed down to a location called Metzgerville, the Metzgerville Cider Press, called Metzgerville, the Metzgerville Cider Press.

Mikaela Prescott:

When people are making apple cider, you're more or less crushing and squeezing these apples into an applesauce texture and draining the juice from it.

Mikaela Prescott:

What that leaves behind is what we call pumice. It's all the stems and twigs and leaves and skin and cores and seeds, and so he essentially strikes up this deal that he's like well, you're not going to use the seeds for anything anyways, give me all that garbage. So he's more or less dumpster diving, in a sense that he's taking all this refuse from the cider making process. He's literally picking the seeds out of it and then carrying them back across the border to this land he's purchased, planting them there and returning to Pennsylvania getting more seeds, planting for someone else. And so when we think about his journey and this sort of idea that it was a really linear path he walked? Not at all. He's returning to places year after year, these orchards that he is maintaining and keeping a tab on, and he's returning because he needs more seeds, more trees. He always has to constantly be moving forward and having those branch campuses to get more material. That's how he keeps moving west, by returning east from time to time.

Ayla Sparks:

Well, and the way that he ended up making some of his money as well, right was, he would have this nursery established for a few years and then would he sell off chunks of the nursery, or would he actually like dig up trees and transport the trees and people would purchase those?

Mikaela Prescott:

So he would eventually sell a lot of this land.

Mikaela Prescott:

Mostly what people were requesting from him he would plant from seed, for I believe I hope I'm not misquoting this a fit petty bit you could slightly more expensive. You could buy an actual whip from him which is this like younger tree, but for the most part when he's doing large orchards further out west he's planting from seed Apple trees and apples are notoriously slow growers. These little trees take about four to five years to flower, another eight to ten before you're getting good apples from them. Depending on when people are coming to their land, their need for trees might be more emergent. So you could pay John Chapman a little extra and he would bring you already growing trees rather than planting the seed for you, already growing trees rather than planting the seed for you. We don't necessarily see his orchards totally dissolve or turn into mist and smoke, but he does like sell off these parcels of land. He's constantly buying and selling land. He'll buy this and he'll plant it and have it for a couple years and then he'll sell it back off, sort of always changing hands.

Ayla Sparks:

When I also read that he didn't do grafting, which is one of the ways that in modern times that's how you shorten how long it takes for an apple tree to actually make apples. It makes the process a lot quicker. But he wasn't a fan of grafting, so instead, the apples that he was growing, they weren't the sweeter kind of apples, they were the more tart apples that really you would only use to make alcohol. And so this article was calling him the American Dionysus, because really he was not just supplying apples, it was more of he was supplying alcohol to the American West. Is there any reality to that?

Mikaela Prescott:

Yeah, absolutely so. I'll break this down into a couple of different hot points here. At first and foremost, people will say oh, he didn't graft because of his religion. His religion was so bizarre they wouldn't let him graft because that would be like tampering in God's domain. That's not really true. He didn't graft, but that's the reason was probably not religiously motivated. It's a very good explanation. That's a. It's a great stab at an explanation.

Mikaela Prescott:

Most likely we're looking at more convenience. If you've got to plant 100 trees dozens of miles away, would you rather drag 100 baby trees with you or an envelope full of apple seeds? The large purpose behind grafting today is so you can grow those sweeter apples. Every apple we see at a grocery store today your Red Delicious, your Gala, your Pink Lady, your Honeycrisp, your Jazz Apple, your Cosmic Crisp those are all more or less clones of one another. They are. You get a tree you really like how it turned out and you're grafting. You're cutting off those limbs and basically bandaging them to what are called rootstock, a different type of tree, to trick that root stalk into growing more of this kind of apple.

Mikaela Prescott:

Johnny Appleseed wasn't setting out to plant snacking apples, like you already sort of prefaced. He wasn't setting out to create the next pink lady apple. He was planting what we call spitters. To say an apple is a spitter is like saying a dog in a shelter is a mutt. You walk into a dog shelter and you're like, oh, that looks a lot like a Labrador mutt. You walk into a dog shelter and you're like, oh, that looks a lot like a Labrador retriever. And the shelter will be like nope, it's a mutt, because we can't prove it's a Labrador, so we're just going to call it a mutt. So he's not planting Rambo apples. He's not planting Granny Smith apples. Did he have favorite apples that he liked to eat? Probably. But what he's actually planting are all these like nasty mutt apples which are more or less similar to a crab apple. They're sort of oblong, they're sort of green and like they're sandy and they're really bitter and quite sour. This is where they get their name Spitter, because they were so bitter that you would take a bite and want to spit it back out. But if what all these apples are being used for is feeding hogs, making vinegar to can and preserve your winter stock, or making alcohol, who cares how they taste?

Mikaela Prescott:

And this alcohol thing is another piece that sort of gets conveniently scrubbed from the real history. A lot of that has to do with Johnny Appleseed's characterization really becoming popular in the zeitgeist. In these 1930s and 40s we're still very much coming off of like prohibition and these moral crusades against alcohol and how alcohol is evil, so it sort of gets scrubbed out of the story. But he's not moonshining. Johnny Apple Thief's not moonshining for people. What he's doing is he's providing them apples. That way they can make alcoholic apple cider. That way they have something safe to drink.

Mikaela Prescott:

This is the government's big plan of why they're telling people you've got to plant apples. You've got to plant apples. You've got to plant apples because they want people to have something to drink. This is when I'm talking about. We have our tours teaching them how we're doing history and putting the pieces together using critical thinking. It's like everyone can turn on the tap at their house and drink it. It might not taste good if you're on well water or something, but you're probably not going to die from it. In Johnny Appleseed's day, dysentery is a huge killer. You know, if you want water you're going to a local stream and you're really hoping that you're upstream of the farmer who has his cows peeing and pooping in that same stream. You're safer to drink alcohol than you are water at this point. So everyone needs a little bit of alcohol just to stay safe and hydrated.

Mikaela Prescott:

When we're talking about their scrubbing this part of the story out, we don't want him to be this American Dionysus. We don't want him to bring alcohol to the West. We don't want him bringing these impurities to these beautiful pioneers who are accomplishing manifest destiny. It's misconstrued by our modern understandings of alcohol and alcoholism and we sort of have tossed out and forgotten how imperative having something safe to drink is. When we don't have bureaucratic entities monitoring waterways and water systems and making sure things are safe to drink, how important it is that someone does have something safe to drink at that time. So it's kind of a shame that it gets left out of the story. But there's been like a reinvigorated interest in like wait a second, was Johnny Appleseed kind of the bad boy of the American West? Was he moonshining? Not at all. He's a very smart businessman and he sort of sees that writing on the wall of people are going to need these apples to make this cider, that way they can keep their land and that way they have something to drink in the future.

Ayla Sparks:

Speaking of these immoral acts of bringing alcohol and just reading from the title, are you talking about?

Mikaela Prescott:

Conjugial Love yes, okay, so don't feel silly. This is, I'm about to take you on such a trip with Conjugal Love. I'm ready, I'm ready.

Ayla Sparks:

Okay, it just sounds dirty and I was like I am very interested in finding out what this means.

Mikaela Prescott:

So this is one of the reasons. When you go on our website and see the things we're purporting, we're like, oh, surely she's going to. This is curator's choice. Surely she's going to talk about you know his Bible. No, I want to talk about this book instead, which is hilarious. I actually got so anxious because I was like 100% certain I knew what I was going to say and then I was like you know what? I've got to call in an expert. So before we met, I actually called a minister for the Swedenborgian faith. I called in some favors to be like hey, I need you to break this down for me one more time.

Mikaela Prescott:

So we have this book called Conjugial Love. To explain it, we have to remember that Johnny Appleseed was a very devout Swedenborgian. Swedenborgianism is started by this guy named Emanuel Swedenborg, and here's your crash course in sort of Emanuel Swedenborg. He actually doesn't really like. He's a theologian, he's sort of a philosopher, he's an inventor, he's the son of a minister and he doesn't really intend to start a religion, but what he does do is write 32 books about his own religious journey, his visions and dreams of religion and God and whatnot, and one of these books is Conjugial Love, and this is why I wanted to touch on this book. I find it fascinating because this copy we have is printed in 1796. So it's actually quite a bit earlier of a text. But this is, you know, an American version, copied in English, 1796. And it's kind of buck wild for its time period.

Mikaela Prescott:

Conjugial love in the broadest strokes is Immanuel Swedenborg's idea about marriage and love and oh goodness how man and women being married and sort of being together, there might come points in which your wife doesn't like you very much and therefore it is good and okay to go get a mistress, just so long as it's sex. Only you should not be romantically involved with your mistress, it should just only be sex, because if a man does not have sex he will get sick and die. Now what's also very interesting is it's not all bad news. He also has these like kind of progressive for his time ideas about women and what women are supposed to be bringing to a marriage. And the act of even having the idea that women might be bringing something important to marriage and something important into the lives of men is kind of novel in of itself.

Mikaela Prescott:

But it's a really funny book. It's a very funny book and it's so interesting to me because in a modern context so the Swedenborgian faith is very much around today. But they experienced a split in the church in the late 1800s and essentially there is the general convention side and there is the general church side. They couldn't have picked more similar names.

Mikaela Prescott:

The general church side takes a very literal reading of all 32 of Swedenborg's books Very literal, do not stray from the text. Whereas the general convention side is like, well, we can sort of adapt and take guesses at what he meant, because he didn't mean to start a religion anyways. So you know what's the harm in sort of expounding upon this sort of you know DLC writing our own fan fiction. One of these big pieces of contention in the Split of the Church is congeal love. The general convention side is looking at the general church side and they're like how do you take this book literally? It's crazy, it's this insane book. It's 230, it's, it's, it's this insane book, it's 230. This 230 year old book is 521 pages originally. So all of Swedenborg's works are largely penned in Latin. So all of these English translations aren't quite perfect either. So even in translating it to English there's a lot of hotly contested. Now you're trying to say we have to take everything he says literally. But you're already not taking it literally because you sort of had to translate it and there's imperfect translations. And so this book is really hotly contested and it's still hotly contested today.

Mikaela Prescott:

The woman I was speaking with, reverend Rosalind Taylor. She started an entire women's group within Swedenborgian circles. One of their main goals is sort of how do we handle this really antiquated book from the perspective of a woman? Because I think what's really key in Swedenborgianism, what also sets it apart from other religions, is, especially at the time, is the Swedenborg believed if you had a marriage that was right and good, you would keep being married in heaven.

Mikaela Prescott:

As a non-religious person I was like, okay, what does that mean? But there's also a lot of denominations, that sort of argue. There are no marriages in heaven. That bureaucracy doesn't follow us. So Swedenborg, who's, interestingly enough, writing this book about his expertise in religion and marriage and how it works together and how important it is from both the man's perspective and the woman's perspective, has a bachelor. He himself never marries, but he's like writing this marriage self-help advice book, which it's so fascinating to me when we're thinking about, like I know, how you can keep your marriage in heaven. Take my word for it A guy who never marries is just fascinating in and of itself.

Ayla Sparks:

And isn't Chapman himself a lifelong bachelor? He never marries. He never marries.

Mikaela Prescott:

So there's a sort of understanding that he did intend to get married at one point, but that gets called off for whatever the reason.

Mikaela Prescott:

She was considerably younger than him and it's believed that, like their marriage was sort of contingent or sort of a deal that was brokered between, you know, her father and work Chapman was doing and eventually what becomes of it is this girl falls in love with a boy her own age and John Chapman's. Like I don't really have an interest in getting involved in this drama, but you know we also think about why no wife, why no kids, and it's like well, no house, you're not quite a hot catch if you're like, hey, babe, want to be my wife and have my kids and, by the way, I'm always going to be walking around barefoot forever all across the states and I probably won't see you. He never gets married but he does have this belief, following Swedenborg's writings, that like I'll probably have a wife in heaven, I'm going to be married in heaven. He probably wasn't really feeling the pressure to go get married and have kids because in his mind and his worldview he's like I've got all the time in the world, I'll just be married in heaven Easy.

Ayla Sparks:

How did you guys come across this book so?

Mikaela Prescott:

this book. I don't actually know where it comes from, but I know why we kept it. This was printed specifically by Francis Bailey in Philadelphia. Francis Bailey is one of the first new churchmen converts in America. He's a historically important but unsung figure. He's actually the printer for the Continental Congress but on the side he's printing this Swedenborgian material and he's really into his faith and that's super cool and he's a neighbor of Benjamin Franklin and they have these reading circles that you know what a group of odd ducks I have to imagine is like Francis Bailey, printer of the Continental Congress, and like Benjamin Franklin, sitting around translating Latin books about ghosts and spirituality from this mystic over in Europe who accidentally started a religion. Gosh to be a fly on the wall for that. What's so fascinating about this copy being printed by Francis Bailey is it actually starts with a disclaimer. I have the disclaimer if you want me to read it, I printed out so much stuff.

Mikaela Prescott:

Okay.

Mikaela Prescott:

So you open the book and it's actually in great condition because it's published 1796, 54 years later there's a note someone wrote in the front cover that says hey, I love this book so much that I rebound it.

Mikaela Prescott:

So it's in great condition because someone rebound it in the 1850s.

Mikaela Prescott:

You open it up and there's this apology on the title page, called Preliminary Observations, by the Translator. It says the translator would not have taken the liberty thus to introduce a new expression and supplant an old one without what appeared to him a sufficient reason and such as will justify him in the opinion of discerning readers. His reason is this that the author himself constantly uses the Latin term conjugial in preference to conjugal, which, when yet the latter term is equally classical and appears alike expressive. And that the author did this intentionally and not of caprice is evident from this consideration that in one particular passage, it is hoped this will be thought a sufficient apology for the translator's following his example on account of its superior softness and expressiveness. So it's fascinating to me that we opened the book and the first thing is like because, like very modern preemptive damage control of like hey, before any of you get in the comments, just know I had a reason for sort of mistranslating this or that, because Latin is hard. So deal with it.

Mikaela Prescott:

It's kind of hilarious. What's also very interesting about this is I love Francis Bailey. I've got like a historical crush on him. I think he's so cool, he's really popular. His printing press is going great. We also know it starts to lose its popularity. One of the reasons is because he switches from sort of publishing all of these like Continental Congress and patriotic things about the new world to doing pretty much only Swedenborgian materials. Swedenborgianism is a pretty fringe religion at this point. So he falls into this niche category where he's not printing anything like that people are really reading anymore. He's got a few smaller customers and that's it.

Mikaela Prescott:

What's really interesting about this artifact is it has a swash letter. A swash letter is a letter stylized in print and what it has is sort of it looks like the integral system, which is this like long, curly F shape, but without the crossbar. This is called the medial S. The S we use today is the round S. The round S is still used. It's in the end of words, so like hers round S.

Mikaela Prescott:

But they'll still use this medial S at the beginning of words and before hyphens, and so before the 18th century that's super standard practice. Reading any document it looks like it says like both sephol and it's like that's so special. They just were using this like silly emoji for some reason. Well, it sort of dissolves because of the development of something called the Caslon typeface. So 1722, there is the Caslon typeface. And when I say Caslon typeface we're sort of talking about like ye olde Times New Roman or Ariel, like this is the font you want everything to be written in, because that's proper and professional, and that includes our Declaration of Independence is actually printed in Caslon typeface.

Ayla Sparks:

Oh, wow.

Mikaela Prescott:

And by 1796, all of Caslon's new typefaces don't have this medial S anymore. They've gotten rid of it. It's no longer the standard practice. So when Caslon font becomes the most acceptable font, any printer worth their salt is going to go out as quickly as they can and buy the new stamps from the Caslon collection. By the mid-1790s Caslon fonts are no longer using the medial S. Your documents shouldn't have the medialS either, sort of dissolving.

Mikaela Prescott:

But 1796, this first edition of Conjugial Love is printed and it does have the medial S. What does this tell us about the state of the super popular, successful printing press? They're printing all this patriotic material. He's in the same reading circles as Benjamin Franklin and then a couple years later we're sort of led to believe either he's lost track of the hot new typefaces or can he not afford the new typefaces. What does that tell us without telling us anything about the state of Bailey's printing press? One of the most important books to him personally, he's printing with outdated typefaces. I think is really interesting. But that's something that when you approached me about the podcast, I was like oh, is this my chance to talk about our copy of Conchuchula?

Ayla Sparks:

Exactly. This is my opportunity Amazing Well and the other opportunity that you took. I'm also very interested in Spoon or spoon.

Mikaela Prescott:

Tell me about the spoon. This is another thing that our whole job as curators sort of contextualize the items we're putting out to make people care about it, to make people interact with it. It's six and a half inches long and it's a pewter teaspoon. The bowl of the spoon, which you'd actually eat off of, is sort of like dippled and sculpted into this carving of an apple tree Right off the bat. That tells us a story. This item was never meant to be used for eating. So, moving forward, what does that leave us with? And my mind immediately goes to not so much our generation, not so much my parents' generation, but a lot of people I know's grandparents.

Ayla Sparks:

My grandma had three cases in our kitchen of all different spoons.

Mikaela Prescott:

There was very much a time and era where people were collecting useless spoons and it was like a cultural resurgence and like everybody's grandma was collecting spoons. So we're led to believe this is like a collector's spoon. But what are they collecting it for? So I sort of get into the sort of theory behind the phrase. They were born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Where does that come from? And the most notable spoon in England being the coronation spoon, of course, 1603, coronation of King James I. It's a literal spoon which holds holy water and the archbishop dips his finger into it to anoint the king. Wonderful.

Mikaela Prescott:

Now, culturally speaking, we're looking at 17th century England. Silverware doesn't come in until the 1700s. If you're going to dinner with someone, you're sort of expected to bring your own, like mess kit, pretty much so when we're talking about spoons and they're sort of, therefore, a status symbol attached to spoons. If you're going to dinner with a noble family and you're expected to bring your own spoons, this is your chance to show off that you've got good spoons, bring out the fine china.

Mikaela Prescott:

Exactly. You're bringing your fine china mess kit to your buddy's house and so you would bring spoons that were like pewter was your upper middle class and silver indicated you were really wealthy because you could afford to bring your mess kit made out of silver to your buddy's house. And then they become more intricate and this sort of goes along with the archbishop and the coronation is. They sort of start coming out with apostille spoons, which are spoons which on the handle or on the bowl shows a picture of one of the apostles, and then that sort of evolves into saint spoons. And then the time frame gets kind of hazy. So some people are sort of citing that these spoons become popular gifts in the late 1400s and that tradition dies out around the mid 1600s, but others are claiming it sort of carries on into the 20th century and, as your grandma can attest, some people are still very much into these collector's spoons. Regardless, it becomes a practice that when a child is baptized they should be gifted a silver or pewter spoon, usually by like a godparent, in order to set them on the right path in life. What's really interesting about these spoons is we're talking about apostille spoons, we're talking about Saint spoons. We have a Johnny Appleseed spoon and so I sort of compared it to a 1490 spoon that the Met has in their collection and the Met has basically gone back and forth like we think it's like 1490 and we're pretty sure that's supposed to be Saint Jude on top, and our spoon is kind of almost identical to this spoon but it's Johnny Appleseed on the top, which is just fascinating to me because we're talking about this character and his folklore and who he is and what he's become. We're sort of brushing into this hazy area of like. The same way we consider saints today is, yes, they were real people, but how literally do we want to take all of their miracles? And for some people that answer is like incredibly literally and that's awesome.

Mikaela Prescott:

And for some folks it's like well, let's take some liberties here and understand that when we're talking about this miracle, what they probably meant was he didn't walk 200 miles. They probably meant he walked like 20. It's sort of that walking back and finding the truth in the detail. This is not the first time Johnny Appleseed is elevated to this idea of this like sainthood. Someone does call him the patron saint of American orchards, Neil Gaiman is calling him an American god, and you yourself have cited an article which is very popular, sort of equates him to an American Dionysus. This is not the first or last time that Johnny Appleseed would be sort of like looked at with that raised eyebrow, and so it's such a little artifact. But I believe that little artifacts can also tell really big stories without saying anything. I find this spoon fascinating.

Ayla Sparks:

Oh well, it's a very special spoon, so it worked out great, thank you. You guys must do some pretty fun events at the museum, I'm guessing too.

Mikaela Prescott:

So it's a bit of a loaded question there. So we have the museum and, historically speaking, our museum is operating under the umbrella of Urbana University. So all of these events and all this stuff was sort of also working with the college. And then the COVID-19 pandemic hits and Urbana University permanently closes. That leaves our museum, which is staffed by the college and run by, like college interns, on one of the college campus buildings.

Mikaela Prescott:

We're sort of in a lurch. We buy a building, we go independent, which was crazy, but it's obviously worked out for us, which is wonderful. But so this is our first sort of we're staring down the barrel at our first year operating by exciting. It's been so rewarding. But this September especially I think I said at the top this would be his 250th birthday.

Mikaela Prescott:

So, as you can imagine, my September calendar is crazy and we're just trying to. Right now we're sort of working on ingratiating ourselves with different school age groups, bringing in a lot of kids and that hands-on experience, because I don't want other future kids to have the same idea of John Chapman that I did, which is like Johnny Appleseed that's the guy who gets me out of math class sort of introducing the importance of John Chapman. And this year especially, we're sort of trying to get involved with all these different events and festivals and Johnny Appleseed hot spots, so his birthday is on the 28th, which is a Saturday. Our town where we're located, urbana Ohio, does a cupola parade and chili cook-off. We are also throwing Johnny Appleseed a birthday on that day.

Mikaela Prescott:

We're going to be in the parade and a lot of people are, like you know, have their chili and going out. We're inviting them to come to the museum, hang out. We've got these beautiful yards, this beautiful side yard, beautiful backyard. We have a Johnny Appleseed descendant orchard. Come see our nasty little apples, come sit in our grass, Come watch the deer, you know, party it up with us and celebrate this guy who's kind of, for all intents and purposes, withstands the test of time. We're hoping next year 2025, we can set a more predictable schedule of events like museums all across the nation. That's our annual this and our annual that, but we're still really new to this whole space.

Ayla Sparks:

Well, it sounds like you guys are well on your way and I'm excited to see where you guys take it. And thank you so much for meeting with me and being willing to share the true Johnny Chapman apple seed.

Mikaela Prescott:

Oh, thank you so much for having me. This was really, this was really a delight.

Ayla Sparks:

Thank you so much for tuning in and supporting Curator's Choice, a Mighty Oak Media production. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing and rating the show on Apple Podcasts, spotify, youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If you love a museum and would like to hear it featured in an episode, shoot me a message at curatorschoicepodcast at gmailcom. I'll do my best to reach out and see if I can get them to be on the show. You can also view articles, artifacts and more by following us on Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for listening to Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers.