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: 
Not if you just plant a whole fruit, no, very unlikely. There is a way to do it, but you need to extract the seeds from the fruit in autumn by cutting it open, lifting the seeds out carefully, then removing any remaining pulp by flushing with water. After drying, they need cold stratification for up to 120 days - a description of how to do all this is shown here <http://homeguides.sfgate.com/propagating-crabapple-seeds-27860.html>, but you should bear in mind that Malus varieties do not come true from seed. The named varieties you buy are vegetatively propagated to ensure they are the right variety - from seed, you don't know what you'll get, other than it'll be a crabapple of some sort.
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.