JOHNNY APPLESEED LADIES (2) PIECE LUXURY WOOL/LINEN/SILK BLEND SUIT

JOHNNY APPLESEED LADIES (2) PIECE LUXURY WOOL/LINEN/SILK BLEND SUIT Johnny Appleseed was based on a real person, John Chapman, who was eccentric enough without the legends. “Johnny Appleseed” mythology ignores the cultish Swedenborgianism and the eccentricity of dress, wandering, and homelessness. It took a good century after Chapman’s death to fully root out his true biography, William Kerrigan explains in “The Invention of Johnny Appleseed.” Born in Massachusetts in 1774, Chapman planted his first orchard on the Pennsylvania frontier in the 1790s. For most of the first half of the 19th century, he tramped around Ohio and Indiana, where his unconventional ways gave birth to plenty of tall tales. Rosella Rice, who had met Chapman when she was a girl, added to the growing myth. Kerrigan notes how Rice and Haley freely copied each other in painting “a kind of magical Santa Claus responsible for almost all the apple trees planted across Ohio.” The myth was further solidified by a Lydia Marie Child poem in 1881. Johnny Appleseed had become the gentler avatar of the American origin myth, an anti-Daniel Boone.