Catalpa festival, anyone?

This fine catalpa is located at the intersection of South Grand Avenue and Highway 14, three blocks south of the southeast corner of the square. The Burlington Northern & Santa Fe overpass is visible in the background.

Chariton's catalpa trees are in full bloom this week, a spectacular legacy of Smith Henderson Mallory, railroad builder and Lucas County's richest and most prominent citizen from the late 1860s until his death during 1903. Although there aren't as many catalpas as there once were, it's still a wonderful show.

This catalpa, now located south of Mallory Drive in the subdivision that occupies the grounds of Smith and Annie Mallory's mansion, Ilion (or Mallory's Castle), was planted by the Mallorys at the southwest corner of their mansion (demolished during 1955) and still is flourishing.

After chasing catalpas for a hour or so Monday morning, it's official: We should declare the catalpas Chariton's official trees, start planting them again and schedule a festival in their honor each year during the first week of June. Catalpafest? Well, maybe. It sure has "Lavitsef," which God help us is "festival" spelled backwards, beat all to heck.

A wall of bloom on the Mallory catalpa. Mallory Drive (below) follows the general course of the old main driveway that once led from the southeast corner of the Ilion grounds to the front door of the mansion itself.

Chariton's catalpas are officially "Catalpa speciosa" or northern catalpa, as opposed to "Catalpa bignonioides" or southern catalpa. The major difference is size. Southern catalpas are smaller. Catalpas are not native to Iowa, but rather to the lower mid-Mississippi valley: Southern Illinois, southeast Missouri, northwest Arkansas, over east as far as southern Indiana. But they will thrive anywhere, once transplanted, so range widely now.

Early on, it was discovered that catalpa wood with just a little care is virtually indestructable: It won't rot. Catalpas also are fast-growing. So enterprising pioneers began to cultivate them for fence posts (a good, straight post in 10 years) and for railroad ties. They put on a great almost-tropical late spring show, too, so catalpas became popular for their blooms as well.

Smith Henderson Mallory entered the catalpa picture during 1882 or 1883. I've forgotten which, and haven't managed to recover three volumes of Mallory notes I loaned out earlier this year. One of those volumes contains a newspaper article reporting that Mallory had imported many thousands (either 30,000 or 60,000 --- darned if I can remember which) of catalpa seedlings. By that year, his mansion, the Ilion, was complete on a 1,000-acre estate stretching north from Chariton's north city limits.

Catalpa seed pods left over from previous years dangle from a branch near a cluster of this year's blooms.

Mallory at that time was building railroads across Kansas and Nebraska into Colorado as well as in the South, and ever practical, proposed to grow his own ties. Thousands of these seedlings were planted closely together (so they would shoot straight up) on his estate and others were distributed widely in and around Chariton and across Lucas County, where they're still flourishing. Smith and Annie Mallory, his wife, became the virtual catalpa king and queen of Iowa, I think; and suspect that many of the big old catalpas that dot lawns across southern Iowa originated from the Mallorys' enthusiasm for the tree.

And finally, a closer view of catalpa blossom clusters.

I don't think Smith Mallory's plan to market catalpa railroad ties ever was fulfilled. America's rail infrastructure grew far more rapidly than the Mallory trees, and by the time the trees were big enough to harvest there wasn't a market for them. So the principal Mallory catalpa legacy to Lucas County is beauty.

Catalpa wood, now, is valued principally by wood carvers: It works easily and has a grain pattern of great beauty, comparable to that of any of the great woods. It's actually harder to come by than, say walnut, because catalpas rarely are harvested. They have a downside in this day when we're obsessed by perfect lawns. Their millions of blooms eventually fall to the ground, creating white carpets; and long seed pods, a foot or more in length, develop. They come down eventually, too. I grew up with two catalpas and we were never bothered by them. But others are.

I just like to look at them. As I said, many fine specimen trees are scattered around Chariton and the surrounding countryside. A remnant of one of Mallory's original commercial catalpa plantations can be seen on a hill that rises above a big pond just south of the HyVee bypass road running east-west along Chariton's north edge.