When I was in elementary school we were told the stories of the great American folk heroes that helped explore, settle, and exploit the American frontier. Some of you are old enough to remember the guys I’m talking about- Walt Disney made them famous back in the 1950’s. They actually showed us the cartoons in the classroom. There was Paul Bunyan with his Blue Ox, Babe, who conquered the north woods by chopping down and clearing out millions of acres of pine trees from Maine to Minnesota. And the steel driving man, John Henry, who could drive a rock drill with a sledgehammer faster than a steam powered machine, cutting tunnels through the Appalachian Mountains for the expanding railroads across the country. And Pecos Bill who was raised by coyotes on the high plains of Texas, used a rattlesnake as a lasso, once roped a tornado and rode it into submission, and scared all of the war paint of them Injuns, which made the painted desert.
Yeah, kind of gave all of us in elementary school back then a warped sense of history, being that some of our greatest American heroes were completely made up bullshit.
But, there was one of Disney’s American Legends that was an actual person; Johnny Appleseed. And according to Disney, he may have been the most IMPORTANT of all American frontiersmen.
According to old Walt’s cartoon, Johnny Appleseed’s story was told by an old settler who knew him well (more on that guy later). Armed with only a Bible, a bag of apple seeds, and a tin pot for a hat, Johnny was encouraged by his VERY own guardian angel to go west and plant orchard after orchard of apple trees from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, over the Appalachian frontier into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, so the settlers across this growing land could have tasty apples to make Apple Tarts, Apple Cobbler, Apple Sauce, Apple Butter, Apple Fritters, Apple Cake, and, on and on and on. We were all taught that only because of Johnny Appleseed and his dedication to spreading the apple across our nation, we have that most American of foods, Apple Pie.
But, there was one thing that Disney didn’t really explain; John Chapman, (his real name) wasn’t growing apples for Apple Pie. He was growing them for cider. And not the kind of cider that we let the kids drink on Halloween. No, John Chapman was cultivating orchards and nurseries of apples for one purpose; hard cider, Early America’s favorite alcoholic beverage.
The Forbidden Fruit
Ah, the apple. Eve tempted Adam with it. An argument over a golden apple between the Greek Goddesses started the Trojan War. Odysseus, returning from that war, yearned for the apple orchards of his childhood while struggling to return to his home in Ithaca. It was believed by the Vikings that the Norse Gods owed their immortality to the apples given to them to eat by Idun, the Goddess of Rejuvenation (although apples didn’t reach Scandinavia until the Middle Ages, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good story). The Arabian Nights tales featured an apple that could cure all maladies and human disease. You know, that one a day that keeps the doctor away. (More about that old saying later).
Idun and the Apples by James Doyle Penrose
We all know the apple. We’ve been eating them since we were children. And most of us know the non-alcoholic cider as a sweet autumnal treat, but many people are surprised to learn that fermented cider was the most popular drink in Early America, given that until just very recently, in the last 20 or 30 years, finding hard cider in an American liquor store was nearly impossible, except in specialty import purveyors.
What Americans call Hard Cider (and the rest of the world just calls Cider) is an old beverage. The first historic documentation of fermented apple juice being consumed in Western Europe is from 55 BCE in Britannia (what is now England). The Romans found the delicious drink there to be the favorite of the native Celtic populations, but cider was already a very old beverage even by then.
Tradition has it that Alexander the Great introduced apples to Europe when he brought apple trees out of the forests of Kazakhstan back to his home in Macedonia. Apples became a favorite fruit of both the Greeks and the Romans, for both eating, and fermented apple juice was consumed by the poorer populations of both of those cultures. But, it was in Northwestern Europe where Cider found its greatest appeal. Apples, and apple seeds, were probably introduced to the Celtic peoples of Gaul during their invasions of the Roman states in the 4th and 3rd Centuries BCE. Taking the apple back to their homelands in what is today modern France, the Celts then spread the trees to northern Gaul (that is today Normandy and Brittany), Galacia in northwestern Spain, and southern England.
Apple trees thrived in the cooler climes of northwestern Europe, whereas grapes cultivation was problematic at best- (Even today, both Normandy and Brittany produce far more apples and cider than grapes for wine). When planted by seed rather than grafted or planted saplings, apple trees have a wonderful ability to adapt to the environment where they are planted, and the fruit could potentially be nothing like the parent stock. Botanists call this Extreme Heterozygosity, and it’s great for evolution of the fruit, producing a multitude of diverse apple varieties that can thrive from Ontario to New Zealand, which has easily facilitated the spread of the fruit so widely over the world. But, this trait is also a minor setback for apple growers who want a consistent variety of apples from generation to generation; the only way that can be assured is by grafting of branches from a desired fruit tree variety onto an established rooted trunk.
Grafting an Apple Tree at Woodleaf Farm
Julius Caesar’s Roman expeditions into the British Isles found the Celts drinking cider in the 1st Century BCE. The Germanic Angles and Saxons, who were from a grain based ale drinking culture, noted at the time of their invasions of Britain in the mid first Millennia CE that the Romanized Britons mainly drank what they called æppelwīn, which was similar to a drink that they made from fermented apple juice themselves. The Vikings, who invaded the British Isles beginning in the late 8th Century CE, wrote of the fermented apple juice of Britain in their sagas, calling the beverage Veig, meaning ‘strong drink.’
Now while the Celts in in Northern France, Britain, and Northwestern Spain established the cultivation of apples for cider production, it was the next wave of invaders that embraced the beverage; the Normans. As a matter of fact, the word cider is a variation of the Norman French word, Cidre. Who were the Normans? The word Norman is a contraction of the words Nord Hommes or North Men, and they were actually Vikings that the French paid off (to keep them from continuously attacking Paris) by giving them the Duchy of Rouen in northern France, the area that we today call Normandy.
In the rolling hills of Northern France, through the process of selected growth and grafting, the Normans perfected the cider apple. The natural sugars in the Norman apples were perfect for fermenting a slightly sweet, crisp, dry cider of about 4 to 6% alcohol, very similar to the ciders found in Normandy, Britain, and Ireland today. Even today, Normandy ciders are considered the connoisseur’s choice. Having been to Normandy I can attest to this. There are three kinds of cider in Normandy; Cidre Doux (sweet cider), Demi-Sac (semi-sweet), and Cidre Brut (dry cider)- all of which are delicious. Besides cider, Normandy is home to two excellent apple liquors using distilled cider. Calvados, an apple brandy, is distilled using copper stills in the same manner as Cognac, aged in oak barrels, and is exclusive to Normandy. The other is Pommeau, a blend of unfermented sweet cider and Calvados, also aged in oak, typically served pre dinner or as an appertiff. Aussi, delicieux!
Apple Trees of Normandy by Jean Baptiste-Armand Guillaumin
With the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror (the Duke of Normandy), defeated Harold of England in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. William’s great grandson Henry II took Ireland a century later. The Normans established cider orchards across England and Ireland, and it became the favorite beverage of the masses. It was not superseded in popularity by ales until the introduction of hops to the beer brewing process during the reign of Henry VIII. Over the next few centuries, varieties of apples of three main types were cultivated; cider apples, cooking apples, and eating apples, and these were the varieties that the English and Irish immigrants brought to the American Colonies.
Two of the pub’s favorite beverages from apples; Magner’s Vintage Cider from Tipperary, Ireland and Busnel VSOP Calvados from Normandy, France
Cider Comes to America
From the beginning, transported in planter barrels, apple trees were brought by ship with the English coming to America. Within a few years of its establishment in 1607, Jamestown had a working cider orchard. In 1620, the pilgrims traveled with a cider press on board the Mayflower, and the large iron screw of the press was actually used to shore up a cracked beam on the voyage over the North Atlantic. In 1623, William Blackstone, one of the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony planted an orchard in Boston only nine days after arriving in the New World. Tenants on Governor’s Island in Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630’s paid their rent in two bushels of apples a year. In 1634, Lord Baltimore, the founder of Maryland, instructed the early settlers of Maryland to bring seeds to grow both apples and pears, for in his words, “thee Maykinge thereafter of cider and perry.” Perry is cider made from pears, and it’s also delicious. Within fifty years, cider became the most prevalent and widespread alcoholic beverage in the English colonies.
Apples thrived in North America, much more so than grapes. Grains like wheat, rye, and barley were needed for bread and porridge, so grain based beer was more expensive, so the colonists brewed beers from other foodstuffs; pumpkins, persimmons, spruce, sassafras, and even green corn; beer was drank but it played second fiddle to cider. Cider was the king of colonial beverages.
Cider Press in 18th Century New England
But why were alcoholic beverages so important in the pre industrial era? The answer to that is ‘water.’ In most places it wasn’t safe to drink, especially in areas of concentrated populations, because human and animal wastes often tainted the water supply with microbial death bugs; typhoid, cholera, dysentery - anyone of which would cause death by diarrhea and dehydration. In low lying areas along the eastern coast of British America, the water table might be a brackish mix of salt and fresh water, and the over consumption of salt water caused excessive urination causing a person to expel more water than they actually consumed, leading to eventual kidney failure, and death. Ah, the good old days.
Now most people at the time didn’t know the science behind bad water, they just knew that if you drank it you could die. My grandfather who grew up in a rural area of Northeast Missouri was scared of drinking water, even from the tap. He’d only drink brewed tea and coffee. I asked him why he didn’t drink water and he told me because he had known people who had died when he was a kid from drinking well water.
Alcohol, even in concentrations as low as 3%, in cider and beer, acted as purifying agent, killing pathogens that would otherwise make one ill. The boiling of water for brewing tea and coffee does the same, but during the colonial period those beverages were luxuries, you couldn’t drink them all the time. Distilled spirits, like corn whiskey and rum, while popular, were entirely too strong to be drank in massive quantities. But cider and beer were drunk by nearly everyone in Colonial America, young and old alike, and more cider was drank than beer, and they drank a lot.
Natural historian Michael Pollan writes of apples, “Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. In rural areas cider took the place of not only wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water.”
In the book, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, written in 1911, the author, Alice Morse Earle claims that in the year of 1721 a town of forty families turned out 3,000 barrels of cider, equaling and estimated 3,150 gallons of cider per family. With estimated households of the day having an average of 6 family members, that equaled 525 gallons of cider per person per year, or about one and a half gallons of cider per day per person. Those numbers were probably inaccurate, given the author’s motivation.
Alice Morse Earle was an active member of the temperance movement of the early 20th Century and she hated drinking. She once stated, and I quote, “The study of tavern history often brings to light much evidence of sad domestic changes. Many a cherished and beautiful home, rich in annals of family prosperity and private hospitality, ended its days in a tavern.”
A more reliable survey from the State of Massachusetts in 1791 calculated that every citizen over the age of 15 annually consumed 34 gallons of beer and cider, 5 gallons of distilled spirits, and 1 gallon of wine, which sounds like a good week to me. But that is still a lot more than the average consumption of Americans today; according to the World Health Organization, we Americans on average consume 3.8 gallons of alcohol a year, half of which is beer.
America’s Favorite Drink
Cider was firmly entrenched as America’s favorite drink when America gained its Independence from Great Britain. Our second President, John Adams drank a quart tankard of cider every morning with his breakfast, and he lived to see 91 years of age. Thomas Jefferson, our third President, grew cider apples on his estate at Monticello.
Other famous Americans in history who were fond of cider included Ethan Allen of the Green Mountain Boys, who mixed half cider and half rum, calling it “Stonewall” because it was said a man drinking it could run through one. Undoubtedly he and the lads from Vermont were drinking their favorite cordial when they captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British in 1775.
Benjamin Franklin said of the Apple, “It is indeed bad to eat apples, it is better to turn them all into cider.” Old Ben seemed to have a dislike of apples, but he did like to have a drink, or two… or five, or a dozen.
Cider even had an impact on one of our presidential elections. In 1840 William Henry Harrison became the ninth man elected to the Presidency of the United States, and he was also the FIRST man to actively campaign for the office, what was known as the “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign, an appeal to the common man of the frontier and western states, (despite the fact that he himself was of a landed aristocratic family of the Virginia Tidewater region, and never, ever, lived in a log cabin), AND it appears as if he had the first campaign slogan:
“With Harrison our country’s won,
No treachery can divide her
Thy will be done with Harrison
Log Cabin and Hard Cider!”
Image of William Henry Harrison campaign poster. Notice the barrel of hard cider represented on the right. Harrison’s followers would often build mock cabins and pull them along on wagons. “Tippicanoe and Tyler Too” is a reference to WHH’s nickname, “Old Tippicanoe” given to him after leading troops in a victory against the Shawnee and other allied tribes at the Battle of Tippicanoe during the War of 1812.
When giving stump speeches at political rallies, Harrison and his teams of supporters would have along barrels of cider, the drink of the common man, and would give out draughts to the potential voters, urging them to help him give the country back to the common man. He campaigned on a populist agenda against the incumbent, Martin Van Buren, who was dealing with an economic downturn at the time. Harrison won the election by 234 electoral votes to Van Buren’s 60- one of the largest differences in the electoral college since the two elections of George Washington; (only James Monroe’s defeat of John Quincy Adams, 231 to 1, in 1820 was greater).
At his inauguration, Harrison (who, at the age of 68, was the oldest man to be elected to the office until Ronald Reagan, who was the oldest to be elected until Donald Trump) strived to keep his common man of the people image intact by riding to the ceremony on horseback, rather than in an enclosed carriage, on a cold and wet day, wearing neither hat nor overcoat. He then gave a speech of two hours in length while exposed to the elements. After the ceremony he rode through the streets of Washington, greeting the people who had braved the elements to see their new president, then he attended three inauguration balls, where it is said that he drank well into the early morning hours. We can only assume that there was some cider being quaffed. Within three weeks of the inauguration Harrison had developed a cold, which morphed into pneumonia and pleurisy, and died 30 days after his inauguration, giving him the distinction of having the shortest term in Presidential history.
The Apostle of Apples
Now, of course, with everybody in America drinking cider, somebody had to have planted all of those apple trees, and the somebody who planted a large swath of them, from Pennsylvania to Illinois, was Johnny Appleseed. But, he wasn’t really anything like the Disney legend.
Paul Rudd would make an excellent Johnny Appleseed. Somebody get onto his agent. Let’s work up a project!
First, let’s dispel some myths. Johnny Appleseed wasn’t a wandering planter, freely distributing apple seeds to anyone who needed them, or just tossing them willy nilly across the land. On the frontier of the Old Northwest (that is the land west of the Appalachians, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River), land could be claimed if it was developed, requiring the planting of at least 50 trees, which Chapman did by planting seeds and developing nurseries. He did move, and move quickly at times, but always with the goal of establishing a claim to more land.
Despite what the children’s books might say, none of the apples he grew were for eating. The seed born trees produced a hardy growing, tart apple called “spitters” which were unpalatable for eating, however were excellent for cider, which we have already established, was highly in demand on the frontier.
His legendary look also seems to have some inaccuracies. Often described as wearing a burlap sack as a shirt and a tin pot as a hat, yet neither claim has been verified. Burlap, even if you’re the toughest sonovabitch on the frontier, wasn’t worn as clothing. More than likely his clothing was of the coarsely homespun linsey-woolsey variety, the most common of attire on the frontier during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.
And, a tin pot for a hat? Why? So apples wouldn’t bonk him on the head? As headwear it would have been cold in the winter and burning hot in the summer. More than likely he wore a brimmed hat made of wool felt or woven straw, as most farmers did at the time. The only eyewitness account of his wearing a tin pot for a hat came from amateur historian and travelogue writer, Henry Howe. But much of Howe’s information about the Old Northwest has been debunked. Like a lot of historians, and authors of the early American frontier period, there was a plethora of romantic, and inaccurate, information being published, probably done to engender a sense of nationalism for the young republic. So, they made shit up. Along with the tin pot for a hat story, Howe also told a story of how Chapman was sleeping in a hollow log to awaken to find a black bear and her cubs had joined him, so he decided it best not disturb the bear, and snuck out of the log, built a fire outside and slept in the snow… Yeah… Okay, moving on.
John Chapman was born in Massachusetts in 1774, growing up in the cradle of the American Revolution. His father, served as a Minuteman at the Battle of Lexington-Concord, and his mother died when he was only two years of age, leaving John to be raised by relatives until his father was discharged from the Continental Army. In 1792 Champman moved from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, where he took up the profession of nurseryman. It was here that he began to collect seeds at the cider mills in during the harvest pressing. He planted the seeds on his claimed lands, or he sold them to others, which became his life pattern. He would develop nurseries, leave them in the hands of workers, then go on to build more, returning every couple of years to check on his holdings. Other nursery lands he sold once he had them developed.
When Chapman died near Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1847, he left an estate of over 1,200 acres of nurseries to his sister. He also owned plots of land in Allen County, Indiana, that held apple trees numbering over 15,000 trees, as well as hundreds of acres in Ohio. Other than what was left to his sister, the remaining holdings were sold on public auction to cover back taxes and litigation, and his nurseries ended up in the hands of others, who continued to grow the apples for the demand in cider.
Chapman’s legacy was nearly wiped out with Prohibition beginning in 1920. With the zealotry of the reformers behind them, the Treasury Department and the FBI destroyed most of America’s cider nurseries, including a lot of Chapman’s. And the memory of cider as America’s favorite beverage was nearly lost to future generations.
Other factors conspired to end the popularity of cider in America. Immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe were more familiar with and favored lager beer. The development of industrial brewing by the Anheuser Busch, Miller, and Coors families, along with the invention of bottling and refrigerated rail cars in the late 19th Century, made transportation of beer across the country possible. Prohibition was just the final blow to cider’s reign as America’s drink.
Remarkably, you can still visit one of Johnny Appleseed’s trees. In Nova, Ohio, there is a 176 year old tree, documented to be planted by John Chapman on one of his early land claims that he returned to a few years before his death. It still produces apples that are used for cooking, and cider.
And the saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away?” A version of the saying originally appeared in Wales in 1866; “An apple before bed will keep the doctor from earning his bread,” but that expression never really caught on. And the saying that we know doesn’t appear in the American lexicon until 1922, during Prohibition. The American apple growers were going bankrupt because they could no longer make cider. A group of them got together, hired a marketing guy to come up with a catchy saying, and they were able to have ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away,’ placed in the Farmer’s Almanac, one of the most read publications in the country at the time, and it worked. Before long the saying was so well known to every American that it was said everywhere.
And to whom did marketing guys attribute this quote?
Benjamin Franklin.
HISHTORY Episode 2
Writer/Producer: Allen Tatman
Technical Director: Brian McGeorge
Recorded at Rivers Edge Studios and Paddy Malone’s Pub, in Jefferson City MO.
A Wylde Irish Production, all rights reserved, Wylde Irish Productions LLC
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Works Consulted:
Earle, Alice Morse. Customs and Fashions in Old New England. New York, Firework Press, 1911.
“Italy in the White House: Carusi’s Saloon Menu.” The White House Historical Association. https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/italy-in-the-white-house-carusis-saloon-menu
Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. New York, Random House, 2002.
Puchko, Kristy. “9 Facts That Tell the True Story of Johnny Appleseed.” Mental Floss. 9/26/2015 http://mentalfloss.com/article/62113/9-facts-tell-true-story-johnny-appleseed
Rupp, Rebecca. “The Highs and Lows of Hard Apple Cider History.” The Plate: National Geographic. 10/18/2015
http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/08/the-highs-and-lows-of-hard-apple-cider-history/
Rupp, Rebecca. “The History of the ‘Forbidden Fruit.’” The Plate: National Geographic. 7/14/2014 http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2014/07/22/history-of-apples/
Stewart, Amy. The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Greatest Drinks. Chapel Hill NC, Algonquin Press, 2013
Stewart, Amy. “The History of Cider Making.” UTNE Reader. June 2013.
http://www.utne.com/arts/history-of-cider-making-ze0z1306zpit?pageid=3#PageContent3
Wilcox, Kathleen. “Why You’ll Find the Best Cider in Normandy.” Vinepair. 7/23/15
http://vinepair.com/wine-blog/why-youll-find-the-best-cider-in-normandy/