Apparently I lost my connection right as I was starting this thread.
From Dex’s Johnny Appleseed column:
LOL! Good one.
My sources show only 127,296 square miles in all of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, so he must have planted some in the eastern part too. 
“He planted over a hundred thousand acres of apple orchards in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana”?
The alternative is to parse it with “planted over” in the sense of “roamed over”. But that still calls for 100,000 square miles of apple orchards to be in existence somewhere, in order to be roamed over…
There’s a tree about 100 feet from my yard (in Glenview) that is descended from Chapman’s stock, and I was happy to find out more about him.
Sigh. I took the figures from one of the resources, I’ll have to go back and see if I miscopied. Give me a few days, it took me a while to get the books from inter-library loan, so I don’t have quick access for double checking.
I suppose if you took half of Pennsylvania (the western half for instance), and all of Ohio and Indiana, the result is just over 100,000 square miles. Perhaps that was his range, not the actual planting.
One thing about the article confused me. Dex said that apples grown from seed do not “grow true”, but Chapman grew most of his trees from seed. I can only assume that the settlers were not worried about edibility for apples destined for cider, correct?
I just saw the other thread. Never mind.
Hmmm, going by the almanac, if you add up the sizes of Ohio, Indiana, and half of Pennsylvania, all rounded to the nearest thousand square miles, you get:
41000 ohio
36000 indiana
99000 square miles!
So it’s unlikely the “over 100,000 square miles” statistic is accurate. It’s gotta be off by a factor of at least 200 I’d surmise.
If it were true, and we make some reasonable assumptions, such as J.A. could plant a seed every 15 seconds, and he did this for 12 hours a day, a little spreadsheeting reveals:
100000 sq miles
5280 ft per mile
27878400 sq ft sq mile
20 feet apart
400 sq feet per tree
69696 trees per sq mile
6969600000 trees
15 secs per tree
1.04544E+11 seconds
3312.799452 years full time
6625.598905 years half time
So Johnny Appleseed lived for at least 6626 years. Musta been all that cider.
I used all of Pennsylvania, in the OP, and the odd bit of water.
Unless he planted faster.
OK, here’s the bottom line. The info about 100,000 square miles was taken from Price’s biography. I’m pretty sure I didn’t miscopy acres or square kilometers or anything like that. It’s possible that Price was simply exaggerating to make his point, it’s more likely that Price meant that he ranged over 100,000 square miles in his travels.
The Price biography is not in our library, I got it from inter-library loan. I confess openly that I’m too busy and it takes too long for me to get the book again and search through to see if I can figure out what Price meant. I’ll put it on my list of things to do, but I ain’t gonna get around to it for a long while.
In the meantime, in the next day or so, we’ll edit the Staff Report to read something innocuous.
My apologies.