John Chapman was born in 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts. His father, Nathaniel, was a farmer and a Minuteman who fought at Bunker Hill. His mother, Elizabeth, died when John was two. The baby she died giving birth to didn’t live long either.

Nathaniel remarried a few years later and had ten more children. John grew up in a crowded house, sometimes in Leominster, sometimes farther west in Longmeadow along the Connecticut River.

It wasn’t a wealthy family. Nathaniel did what work he could; farming, carpentry, sometimes labor for hire. The Revolution had burned through whatever savings they had, and soldiers weren’t paid enough to raise a family that size.

No one wrote much about John as a boy. He shows up again in the records as a teenager, apprenticing with a man named Crawford, who ran an apple nursery. Crawford taught him how to grow trees from seed, how to graft branches to rootstock, and how to protect young trees from frost and animals.

John never married. Which is crucial to his story. Seeds, he scattered all across the Ohio valley, just not his own.