Reflections: Kendall County’s own apples were once a valuable cash crop

Every autumn, it seems, our fancies turn to apples – raw, baked into pies and other pastries, dipped in caramel. Americans seem to crave them all.It’s a love that dates back more than two and a half centuries, during which time North America’s wild crabapple trees were replaced by acres upon acres of hybrid apples imported from the Old World.It seems a New Englander born in I774 encouraged and then accelerated America’s long and passionate love affair with the apple.Born in Massachusetts, John Chapman eventually ended up in Pennsylvania where he sold saplings and apple seeds to families migrating west. Feeling that he wasn’t doing enough to spread apple trees to the frontier, he walked through present day Ohio about 1800, sowing apple seeds into orchards as he went. And along the way he earned the nickname we all learned to know him by: Johnny Appleseed.Gradually, he moved westward, planting thousands of apple trees across Ohio, Indiana and western Pennsylvania to aid thousands of sett