I taught journalism at a university in the Midwest and lived along the shore of a vast Indiana lake, the kind of inland sea that makes you rethink scale and patience. It was there, in that landscape shaped by glaciers and human grit, that I kept returning to the story of Johnny Appleseed, not the cartoon saint skipping barefoot through the woods, but the man himself: John Chapman.
You can visit his grave in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a fitting place for a figure so deeply tied to the practical idealism of the frontier. Chapman is often remembered as a harmless eccentric, scattering apple seeds as an act of whimsical generosity. But that version of the story misses what mattered most.
Johnny Appleseed was an astute businessman. As Chapman moved through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and into Indiana and Illinois, he didn’t simply toss seeds to the wind. He planted nurseries—deliberate, planned orchards,often years before settlers arrived. Once the trees were established, he sold the orchards to incoming families. This mattered because apple trees, unlike annual crops, helped settlers lay legal claim to land. Chapman wasn’t just planting food; he was planting legitimacy, stability, and future.
Yet to see him only as an entrepreneur would be to miss something even more essential.
John Chapman was a devout missionary of the Swedenborgian Church, formally known as the Church of the New Jerusalem. Along with apple saplings, he carried books, small volumes of Emanuel Swedenborg’s writings, which he gave or read aloud to frontier families hungry not just for crops, but for meaning.
Swedenborg’s theology rejected the idea that heaven and hell were places assigned by divine decree. Instead, they were states of being, conditions of the soul that people gravitated toward based on how they lived.
God, in this view, did not send anyone to hell. People chose it. Heaven was not a reward for belief alone, but the natural outcome of a life shaped by charity, usefulness, humility, and love of others. Hell was not fire and brimstone imposed from above, but the inward consequence of selfishness, cruelty, and contempt for community. Faith without action was meaningless. What mattered was how one lived, daily, quietly, repeatedly. Johnny Appleseed took this theology literally.
Every day, by his understanding, was a rehearsal. One could experience heaven or hell not after death, but now—in how one treated strangers, animals, the land, and one’s own appetites. Chapman’s legendary kindness to animals, his refusal to fence land unnecessarily, his simple dress and barefoot travel were not affectations. They were disciplines. Ways of aligning daily life with spiritual truth.
Even his business practices reflected this moral framework. He planned ahead, respected law and order, and believed in ownership, but not hoarding. Wealth was a tool, not a destination. Usefulness, not accumulation, was the measure of a life.
In this sense, Johnny Appleseed feels less like a mythic figure and more like an early American answer to a question we still struggle to articulate: What does it mean to live rightly in a growing, restless country?
There is something profoundly Midwestern in his example. Plant now so others may eat later. Accept hardship without spectacle. Build quietly. Leave the land better than you found it. Understand that freedom without moral gravity collapses into chaos, and that chaos, in Swedenborgian terms, is its own form of hell.
Standing by that Indiana lake, watching seasons turn with geological indifference, it was impossible not to feel the weight of Chapman’s insight. Heaven and hell are not abstractions reserved for theology. They are lived realities, constructed out of ordinary choices: patience or greed, care or neglect, service or self-absorption.
Johnny Appleseed did not skip through life without a care. He walked deliberately, carrying seeds and ideas, convinced that the future depended on what people chose to practice today.
And perhaps that is why his story endures, not because it is quaint, but because it is unsettling.
We are still planting orchards we may never sit beneath.
And every day, we are choosing the kind of world, and soul we are growing.