Page 36 - May1990

sz N.ATnONAI BUTT0N tsUn n ETN Mev rqqo

A sampling of apple buttons
is shown here. From the left,
top row: (l cut sreel apple in
)
brass cup, (2) ceramic, (3)
paper under celluloid, set in
metol. Bottom row: (1 brass
)
grouping of apple, grapes
and pear, (2) glass.

careful not to alarm her husband too much, but let him know she was not well. Her
husband kept this letter and on June 26,1776, another son was born. She named him
Nathanael, Jr. On July 18,1776, Elizabeth died of consumption-the infant son soon
followed. Little John and his sister were taken in by the Simons family.
In July 1780, Nathanael married again to a Lucy Cooley. She was 18, he was 34.
They moved in with the widow Cooley, in a small house in Longmeadow, New York.
He brought his motherless children to live with them. The children went to school. One
day the schoolmaster, apparently bored with the same old reading, writing and
arithmetic, brought an apple to school and laid it on his desk. When he quieted the
noisy children, he impaled the apple on a pointed stick and lit the stub of a candle.
Holding them high, he intoned, "Scholars, behold this apple! It is like unto the planet
Earth, on which we dwell, see how it spins in infinite space. Note how the apple
revolves around the candle light which represents the great sun which lights the apple.
My fingers soon tire of spinning the apple, but God's hand guides earth's turning in
time that has no end." Then the master, in a voice of thunder and lightning,
commanded the children to think upon God's vast power and glory, and at the same
time to remember that they themselves were miserable sinners. In those days, a
schoolmaster was likely to slap a dreadful warning or a spine-chilling moral on
everything said. But John Chapman scarcely heard the warning. He was too full of
young wonder, looking up at the turning apple. What a lovely roundness it had,
shining with day in the light of the candle and with night when turned away. Being a
child filled with dreams, it made a lasting picture on John's mind-the apple turning in
space like the earth, and the master's guiding hand like the hand of God. He was a bit
mixed up, being only about seven years old, but he thought "Earth is an Apple...Earth
is a round Apple."
In I 790, John was I 6. There was a crop ofup-and-coming half brothers and sisters
in the little house of Grand ma Cooley. As for John himself, growing more long legged
every day, it was time he was earning his own bread. While he was a little shaver, he
sold herbs and peddled his father's handmade woodenware through the countryside.
He was an odd, independent sort, his folks always said.
ln 1792, John was 18. His half brother Nathanael was l l. The two boys set out to
see an uncle in Olean, a small settlement in western New York state. When they
arrived, however, the uncle had gone pioneering, so they moved into the empty house
for the winter. Come spring, Nathanael faded away like a small ghost, not to be heard
of until he was a young man in Ohio. John went to work in the orchards...and then
with the tide of pioneers west. John Chapman had a mission, it was an odd one, but as
important to him as a man's can be. It had nothing to do with disappointment in love,
or with being kicked silly in the head by a horse. John's boyhood had been shaped by
pity. In the boy's heart, the wisdom of the Bible, which he had learned to read when