My daily calendar tells me that today is Johnny Appleseed Day.

John Chapman (1774?-1845), aka Johnny Appleseed, is famous for planting apple trees along the American frontier in the Old Northwest, primarily in the Ohio River Valley. He subsisted by selling seedlings (at six cents each, if he could get it), or bartering them for food and clothing.

He also carried a religious message as he went. My calendar mistakenly identifies him as "evangelical" in spreading "biblical messages."

Chapman was a Swedenborgian, a religion that follwed the teachings/visions of Emmanuel Swedenborg (1668-1772), a Swedish scientist, engineer, and philospher. Swedenborg believed that God spoke to him through dreams and visions, showing him spiritual truths and the correct interpretation of the Bible. To quote from Encarta

Swedenborg maintained that in 1757 the last judgment occurred in his presence, that the Christian church as a spiritual entity came to an end, and that a new church, foretold as the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation, was created by divine dispensation. According to Swedenborg, the natural world derives its reality from the existence of God, whose divinity became human in Jesus Christ. The highest purpose is to achieve conjunction with God through love and wisdom.

Many of the Romantics were influenced by Swedenborg's writings, including for a time William Blake.

A church was founded based on his teachings that continues today, though in its influence diminished since the nineteenth century, and split into two. The Swedenborgian Church and The New Church.