“Johnny Appleseed” Nursery / Shanesville, Shane’s Crossing, Rockford

Side A: John Chapman (1774 – 1845) leased these three acres to the north and west from William Botts Hedges on April 29, 1828. He paid Hedges by cultivating 1,000 apple trees on the site over the next ten years. Apples provided an important food source. Cut and dried for sauces in the winter, they could be pressed into cider or “apple jack” at a time when water often carried disease. The Hedges Nursery profited the Shanesville area by shipping apples to the major trading posts at Piqua and Ft. Wayne. During his lifetime, Chapman proved an able businessman who established profitable orchards in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. In 2009, American Forests, the Johnny Appleseed Foundation, the Museum at Urbana University, and the Village of Rockford planted two “Rambo” apple trees at the Hedges Nursery site. Side B: Anthony Shane, a “métis” of French-Ottawa ancestry, began work as an interpreter at Fort Defiance in 1795. In 1814, the U.S. Congress granted him 320 acres of land and he platted his town, Shanesville, south of the St. Mary’s River in 1820. Opening a store, Shane traded with the nearby Shawnee Indian reservation and during their forced removal to Kansas in 1833, Shane migrated with them where he remained as an interpreter until his death in 1834. William Hedges, who leased land to John Chapman to establish an apple nursery, began as a clerk in Shane‘s store and later opened his own establishment. Hedges served Shanesville as Postmaster, Colonel of the Militia, Commissioner, Justice of the Peace, and Associate Judge. Shanesville changed its name to Shane’s Crossing (1866) and finally to Rockford (1890).