[1] He was born on July 23, 1771, at the home of his great-uncle, John Pledger – a large plantation in Mannington Township, New Jersey called the New Netherland Farm.

[1] He was visiting the farm in March 1778 when the British raided Salem during the American Revolutionary War and killed several of the inhabitants.

[3] Their fourth and last child, Robert Carney Johnson, married Julia Harrison and went on to inherit the family estate in Salem.

[6] Johnson wanted this house to remain in the family, but it was sold to the county in 1922 and relocated when a new courthouse was built on the plot.

[8][9] In 1794, Johnson served in the New Jersey brigade under Joseph Bloomfield as paymaster of its second regiment and saw action in the Whiskey Rebellion.

[1] In 1796, he was appointed a commissioner of the loan office for the county – a New Jersey institution founded to provide mortgages to local farmers to help their cash flow.

He maintained a collection of important local historical documents and was instrumental in establishing a public library in Salem.

Johnson was an active horticulturist and was a president of the New Jersey Horticultural Society,[10] and wrote about draining marshland in The American Farmer in 1826.

[10] Tomatoes became a significant crop in southern New Jersey, which was able to ship its fresh, ripe produce to the local large markets of New York and Philadelphia.

[12] However, even though much contemporary material relating to Johnson survives, the first written claim associating him with the introduction of the tomato to Salem dates only to the early 20th century.

[13] The apocryphal story accompanying this posthumous reputation was popularized by Joseph Sickler, the Salem postmaster, who told Harry Emerson Wildes an anecdote about Johnson publicly eating tomatoes to prove their safety on account of the plant being in the nightshade family.

[14] The legend of Johnson's daring deed then became well-established in numerous works and retold in further dramatic accounts:[15]Col. Johnson announced that he would eat a tomato, also called the wolf peach, Jerusalem apple or love apple, on the steps of the county courthouse at noon.

"He's still alive"For a period in the 1980s, Salem celebrated "Robert Gibbon Johnson Day" by re-enacting the dramatic event with live actors in costume.

[16] In 1988, Good Morning America reported that Johnson was the first to eat a tomato in the United States,[17] but there are hundreds such stories about other individuals – Thomas Jefferson, a Shaker bride, immigrant Italians (e.g., Michele Felice Cornè), and many others – even though the tomato was long recognized as edible throughout Europe and Central and South America.