Glossary · History
Johnny Appleseed
Also written John Chapman. Each is a name for the same thing, which is why none of them has an entry of its own.
Definition
John Chapman, an American nurseryman of the early nineteenth century who planted apple nurseries across the Ohio valley frontier. His trees were seedlings, so their fruit was chiefly for cider rather than for eating.
- Subject
- History
- Also written
- John Chapman
In more detail
The folk figure and the historical man diverge sharply. The popular story is about eating apples and generosity; the documented activity was the establishment of nurseries ahead of settlement, selling seedling trees to settlers who needed an orchard to prove a land claim, and whose fruit — being from pips rather than grafts — was suited to cider and vinegar.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
History
Prohibition
The United States ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks between 1920 and 1933, which broke the continuity of American cider-making and coincided with the loss of many cider orchards.
Fruit
Wilding
A tree grown from a chance seedling rather than grafted from a known cultivar, and the fruit it bears. Wildings supplied much of the fruit in old hedgerow and farm orchards.
Cider
Hard cider
The North American term for fermented, alcoholic apple juice, used because the unqualified word "cider" means the unfermented pressing there.
Fruit
Cultivar
A named clone propagated by grafting, so that every tree of it is genetically identical to the original seedling. "Variety" is used interchangeably in trade, though it has a stricter botanical meaning.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own
Ben Watson, The Countryman Press, first edition 1999; third edition 2013 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: first published 1999 by The Countryman Press, with five editions recorded and a 2008 printing scanned by the Internet Archive as ciderhardsweethi0000benw. The scan is access-restricted to the print-disabled collection. The site had registered this without a year; it now carries one, and the first-edition date matters because a general trade book on cider written in 1999 predates almost the whole of the North American cider revival it is sometimes cited about.
Cider: Making, Using and Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider
Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols, Storey Communications, 1997; first published as Sweet & Hard Cider by Garden Way, 1980 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, and the verification changed what CiderHQ knows about it. The work first appeared in 1980 as Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, & Enjoying It (Garden Way, Charlotte, Vermont) and was retitled for the 1997 Storey edition the site had registered; nine editions are recorded in total. That matters for a source cited on North American practice, because a passage in the 1980 text and a passage in the 1997 one are not interchangeable and neither is the 2003 revision. Two scans exist in the Internet Archive — sweethardciderma0000prou for the 1980 edition and cidermakingusing0000prou for the 1997 — both access-restricted to the lending library and the print-disabled collection, so neither is openable by retrieval.