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In this era of fanciful and disposable pieces of popular culture, thoroughly void of substance or relevance, the Fort Wayne TinCaps should be given the proverbial tip of the hat for their selection of a name and mascot so uniquely rooted in Fort Wayne’s past. And yes, one that has some historical accuracy.
Of the legions of historical figures who called Fort Wayne and the Three Rivers region their home, perhaps none has been more distorted by lore than John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed.
The popular image of a thickly bearded, shoddily dressed shoeless fellow crowned with a cast iron cooking pot, whimsically skipping through meadows and aimlessly flinging about apple seeds, belittles and misrepresents this incredibly complex and dynamic person.
In reality, he was a shrewd frontier entrepreneur and ultramonastic Swedenborgian missionary who skillfully preceded waves of westerly shifting settlers with his enormous (and enormously profitable) apple tree nurseries. For decades Chapman purposefully ventured just beyond the flow of westward streaming settlements in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, so that as American settlers filled the frontier they would be met with his finely established apple orchards, supplying the fruit for both consumption as a foodstuff but more importantly for processing into hard cider.
Chapman owned and cultivated numerous land tracts and thousands of acres across these three states, worth a veritable fortune in the early 19th century.
Arriving in Fort Wayne around 1830 on a pirogue laden with sacks full of apple seeds, he cared for at least four known apple orchards in Allen County, carefully positioned along the fertile and accessible Maumee River. The largest of Chapman’s nurseries in Allen County contained more than 15,000 apple trees, a gigantic enterprise even by the standards of today’s mechanized agriculture.
But for all the varying images of Johnny Appleseed as rugged businessman, unkempt beggar, itinerant mystic or roving planter, one feature of the man transcends all of these descriptions and captivates our community and the world just as it did nearly two centuries ago: his hat. Let this historian go on record as stating that it is a historical fact that occasionally Johnny Appleseed did indeed place a cooking container made of tin on his head.
With more than 750 linear feet of archival materials in the historical collection of the History Center (to put that in perspective, if one stacked the Lincoln Tower on top of One Summit Square the total height would be just about as tall as the stack of papers from our archives) there are two – only two – eyewitness accounts of Johnny Appleseed wearing a tin cap.
The first account is from John Dawson, a local newspaper editor and contemporary of Johnny Appleseed, observing that “his headgear was rarely ever alike for a long time.” More than once, Dawson saw Johnny Appleseed with “a tin vessel worn on his head, which he used to cook his frugal meals in.” Dawson goes on to note that sometimes Johnny Appleseed would wear multiple layers of hats where “he carried his Testament and Swedenborgian books,” placing his cooking pot atop the amalgamation.
The second account comes to us from the Johnny Appleseed Educational Center and Museum at Urbana University, Ohio. John Henry Cook of Ohio similarly observed Johnny Appleseed’s “pyramid of three hats,
The memory and contemporary interpretations of John Chapman provide both a fascinating case study in the analysis and assessment of historical sources and a good lesson in the role that the past plays in our everyday, (and I hate to say it) popular history.
As our community wishes the TinCaps a fruitful inaugural season with a new name, mascot and home, many children and adults alike will undoubtedly ask “did he really wear a tin cap.” Did Johnny Appleseed wear a tin cap? Certainly. Did he wear a tin cap all the time? Absolutely not.
But what matters is that in a time when spin is the norm and context goes out the window, fans of the newly rechristened TinCaps will be exposed to a small glimmer of truthful history. Good history is hard to find nowadays; people should take it any way they can.
