Question: In our road we have a crab apple tree that has fruits but there have never been any small new trees rooting from the crab apples. Once, years ago, there were 3 crab apple trees within 100 yards but 2 of these were destroyed by some ignorant house owners. However in my 83 years of living within 50 yards of these three trees I have never seen any young new seedling trees. Some of the apples must have fallen onto the surrounding soil that is never disturbed. Will an apple tree grow if I deliberately plant some of the fruit from this one remaining tree?

Answer: 
Yes. You can learn a lot from this extensively reworked and thought-out answer to a similar question about roses: [How do I grow roses from seed?](https://gardening.stackexchange.com/questions/5548/how-do-i-grow-roses-from-seed)

Fruits of all kinds are attractive to wildlife, and are presumably picked up and eaten or stored in underground dens where the seeds never see the light of day again, or immediately eaten and deposited later in a remote bank. Seeds may well have built-in dormancy which ensures that they do not germinate for years to spread out the risk. But sometimes you can wait too long.

Just burying the fruit or seeds probably won't give you the hoped-for result. It's a matter of making it a special project and putting in lots of TLC to make sure the trees survive.
If you think about the reason why fruit exist, it is to employ animals to disperse the seeds far away from the parent tree. So if this works (which we can assume it does based on the principles of evolution) one might expect that not many of the seeds will remain near the parent for the requisite amount of time (the cold of winter, the warm of spring) to induce germination. Those seeds that are dropped relatively nearby will face a lot of competition: shading from other plants, predation, gardening activities of humans, etc.

The previous comment about apples not coming true to seed is valid, except what this usually means is that cultivars of apple result in something more like crab apples, which is not a problem in your case. If you plant a bunch of seeds and keep them the cold over the winter, you should get some saplings in the following year.