Johnny Appleseed Walked Through a Snowstorm for His Seedlings

Johnny Appleseed was a real man named John Chapman, born in Massachusetts in 1774 and raised in a home where he grew a lifelong devotion to the Bible. Around 1800 he planted his first orchard near Franklin, Pennsylvania, using seeds he gathered from cider mills. He became an experienced nurseryman who owned more than 1,200 acres across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. Even though selling seedlings was his business, he gave away nearly as many trees as he sold, and he told Bible stories and encouraged frontier families in their faith everywhere he went. In March 1845, he heard that a fence around one of his orchards near Fort Wayne, Indiana, was down and cattle were getting in. He set off on foot through a snowstorm to save his seedlings, caught pneumonia, and died on March 18, 1845, at 71. He spent his life planting things he’d never see full grown.

Wangari Maathai Started with One Tree at a Time

Wangari Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya, in 1940 and became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate. In 1976, while serving with the National Council of Women of Kenya, she introduced a simple idea: plant trees with ordinary people. That idea grew into the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots effort that helped women plant more than 20 million trees on their farms and on school and church grounds. It spread to other African countries too, as people she trained started their own tree-planting efforts. In 2004 she received the Nobel Peace Prize. It didn’t start with a grand plan to change a continent. It started with a seedling and a willing pair of hands, and then another, and another.