The Ilion, 1879-1955

Smith H. and Annie L. Mallory (left below) most likely conceived the idea of a grand home in or near Chariton not long after their arrival in 1867. They were, after all, Lucas County’s richest family (when the 1870 census of Chariton was taken, Smith reported that he owned real estate valued at $81,550 and personal property valued at $88,350, phenomenal affluence for Iowa at that time).

Smith was just then at age 32 launching a career as railroad entrepreneur and banker, so an adequate setting for entertaining would be needed as well as a home that spoke to the family’s increasingly prominent position in southern Iowa.

Their first home, on multiple lots at the current site of Chariton High School, certainly was comfortable, but did not differ markedly from the frame homes of their less affluent neighbors.

Smith’s first great building project in Chariton was the Mallory Opera Block on the northwest corner of the square, begun in 1872 and completed in 1873. It was one of the finest building of its type in Iowa when complete, mixing business fronts on the ground floor and offices and lodge rooms on the second and third floors with the grand auditorium and related spaces that filled the majority of the building behind the commericial and social façade.

We know that the Mallorys had in hand plans for a new house during the spring of 1874 because The Chariton Patriot of 30 April, that year, reported, “S.H. Mallory has the plans for his new residence ready. He thinks of building on his farm north of the depot. The house will cost upwards of $25,000.” We cannot be sure that these plans were for the Ilion as built, but most likely they were.

Since the plans were prepared so soon after completion of the opera block it is tempting to conclude (as I have) that the same architect designed both.

Although neither the opera block (below) nor the Ilion can be definitely attributed, the most likely candidate for their designer is William Foster of Des Moines, just then emerging as one of Iowa’s leading architects. He specialized at first in the design of opera houses and according to later newspaper reports designed “most of Chariton’s finest buildings,” concluding with the Lucas County Courthouse in the 1890s.


There are a number of similarities between the Ilion and another of Iowa’s doomed mansions, John Wesley Redhead’s great house in east Des Moines, designed by Foster during 1867-68 but destined to fall, like the Ilion, during the 1950s. The Redhead mansion was doomed by its location, stranded in its grandeur in what became a working-class area as the city’s elite moved to the hills west of downtown.

During 1880, when construction of the Ilion was well underway, Smith (in partnership with Henry Law)commissioned Foster to design a double-front business block (40 feet wide and 85 feet deep) on the east side of the square (Chariton Patriot, 12 May 1880). This building, although it has lost its galvanized iron cornice, still stands as the only surviving Mallory structure in Chariton.

The date stone once embedded high in the Ilion’s tower reads “1879,” so that must have been the year construction began. The Chariton Leader reported on 5 July 1879 that “the work on Mallory’s fine brick residence is progressing slowly but surely.” Finishing work on the interior still was under way during March of 1881, when The Chariton Democrat reported on the 12th that “Willmarth is doing the graining in Hon. S.H. Mallory’s new residence. He is an artist, and is doing a job that any one should be proud of.”

The Mallorys themselves apparently moved into the Ilion during the summer of 1881 after Annie and daughter Jessie, who had spent much of 1880 in Europe, returned home.

This photo is the oldest known of the house and probably was taken during the early 1880s. It shows the house as originally built. And it shows the house from it’s most flattering angle, looking from southeast to northwest. Viewed head on from the south, the house always appeared rather tall and narrow, the west façade is just plain peculiar and the north side of the house never was intended for public consumption. But from the southeast, which was the direction from which family and friends most frequently approached, it is satisfyingly substantial and harmonious in its irregularity.

That irregularity was a key feature of the “rustic” Italianate style popular a few years before the Ilion was built, another reason to think it was designed a few years before construction began. It looks back in style rather than forward.

One major design flaw is evident in the photograph. There was no porch to cover the front door at the base of the tower. A canvas canopy has been rigged here to shelter the steps, but this cannot have been a convenient way to enter a grand house when it was raining or when ice or snow had slicked the substantial flight of steps. That difficulty was rectified in the 1890s when new porches were wrapped around the south and west facades and a porte cochere constructed so that guests alighting from their carriages always were protected from the elements. If you look at the photo carefully, you can see the “Ilion” name stone embedded in brickwork immediately above the front door and the “1879” date stone imbedded high in the south front of the tower.

The tower always was the most distinctive feature of the house and, topped by an elaborate wrought iron rail, it really was magnificent. However most of it was for practical purposes wasted space. It did provide a commodious vestibule, divided from the inner hall by another set of double doors. That inner hall then passed north between the drawing room in the southwest wing (its projecting bay window is evident here) and the family parlor in the southeast wing (at right) before curving, literally, to the west behind the drawing room where a beautiful but somewhat narrow walnut stair was located. Tower rooms on the second and third floors, however, were occupied almost entirely by the beautifully-constructed winding wooden stair that led up to an observation room within the mansard roof atop the tower. From there, access could be gained by ladder to an observation deck surrounded by the wrought iron rail.

The drawing room to the southwest was the largest and most elaborate room in the house with walls paneled in a vaguely French manner and a parquet floor suitable for dancing. This is where major events ranging from concerts to funerals were held.

Across the hall to the east was a smaller family parlor wrapped on the south and east by a fairly simple porch that probably had wrought iron columns and decorative arches. Projecting east from this porch (and linked to the house by an enclosed hyphen roofed by the porch) was an elaborate eight-sided solarium, originally with a mansard roof in the same spirit as the tower roof.

That mansard solarium roof had been replaced by the 1890s (perhaps at the time the house was extensively renovated) by what essentially was a shallow glass cap, perhaps intended to allow more light into the room below.

Interestingly, there were no doors from the family parlor onto the porch or into the solarium. Instead, the lower panels of the two south and the southeast parlor windows reached the floor, so that when those panels were raised it was possible to exit onto the porch or into the solarium. While it is possible that these were “pocket” windows --- meaning a portion of the lower panels would pass into recesses above the windows when raised to increase the height of the opening --- this would have been a neat trick to execute in a house with solid brick walls.

Speaking of walls, the major interior walls of the house were of brick construction, too, so it was an extremely solid building --- showing few if any cracks or instability 75 years later, when it was demolished. The basement was quite high and apparently double-walled under the main block of the house. The exterior foundation/basement walls were of quarried limestone and the interior, separated by a narrow space, of brick. This, too, was a William Foster trademark. He intended basements to be used by a home’s occupants, especially in the summers of an era that predated air conditioning. There are several references in writings about the Ilion to “recreation rooms” in the basement. There also was a wine cellar, perhaps in the base of the tower.

The house had five magnificent chimneys. The four in the main block of the house served fireplaces in the drawing room, family parlor, library and dining room as well as fireplaces in the bedrooms directly above. The chimney at the north end of the kitchen wing served cook stoves, one in the kitchen and one probably in a sub kitchen below. There may or may not have been a fireplace in the room intended for servants above the kitchen.

It is not clear if the house had central heating from the start. The presence of a working fireplace in every room suggests not, but on the other hand the technology was available in the late 1870s and there would have been no reason not to install central heating in a house this grand. By the time much later that anyone bothered to comment on heat, a boiler-fired steam system was in place.

The southeast family parlor wing seems to have been modified at some point, perhaps in the 1890s when new porches were built. Originally, the north part of the wing seems to have been a narrow hallway running the length of the parlor and separated from it by a timber-framed wall. The exterior door barely visible here in the extreme northeast corner of the wing, opening onto the porch just north of the solarium, apparently opened into that hallway under a narrow stair that doubled back on itself to reach the second floor. Anyone entering this door, probably intended for family and friends, could exit the hallway left into the parlor or right, into the library. At some point, the stairway and dividing wall were removed to create a larger parlor that was somewhat clumsy in appearance since the fireplace now was off-center in the east wall and the door onto the porch was uncomfortably jammed up against the north wall.

So the front “L” of the house contained the drawing room, family parlor, tower and central hall that curved west behind the drawing room. The north wing contained two rooms --- the library to the east (it’s bay window, identical to the drawing room bay is visible in the old photo) and the dining room to the west. The dining room’s west end projected from the main body of the house in a room-width bay with windows facing southwest, due west and northwest. There was no entry to the library from the main hall. Double doors led from alongside the main staircase into the dining room.

A narrow service hall seems to have been located between the dining room and the library to allow access from the hallway to the kitchen wing, which projected north from the north wing. This wing was lower than the main block of the house, as befitted its station as working quarters. The kitchen extended across the entire north end of this wing. Sandwiched between the kitchen and the main block of the house were a substantial pantry, a back stairway to servants’ rooms on the second floor and perhaps a bathroom. We’re just not sure how this part of the house was configured.

Projecting north of the kitchen wing was a highly unusual feature for this era --- a wood frame attached carriage house as wide as the kitchen wing and projecting slightly to the east. This structure could be accessed directly from the kitchen and no doubt made loading and unloading supplies easier. It appears to have had a second story and this may have been intended to compensate for limited storage space in the house. The Ilion did not have useful attics because of the shallow slopes of its roofs, so out of season clothing and other items that might in other houses have been relegated to the attic may, in the Ilion, have ended up in a loft over the carriage house.

There was a full porch along the east side of the kitchen wing, obscured here by ivy. It had columns and arches similar to those that wrapped around the southeast wing, but mounted on high bases to give the porch a slightly different look.

With the exception of alterations to the family parlor wing, the house does not seem to have changed much inside during its lifetime, but extensive exterior changes were made in the early 1890s, often credited to the Mallorys’ desire to entertain at newly-fashionable porch parties.

During that remodeling effort, the old porch across south side of the family parlor was removed and moved around to the east to extend the porch there north across the library bay window.

A new porch was built across the entire south front of the house and wrapped around the west side, extending across the exterior door under the main stairway before stopping just short of the dining room bay. A porte cochere extended south from this porch, straight south of the tower, allowing guests to exit their carriages under a sheltering roof and climb a gentle series of steps to the front door.

The porch had neoclassical columns, at odds with Italianate design of the main house, and never really quite fitted in although it endured for 60 years. Some alterations were made to the fabric of the main house when the porches were added. The roof of the drawing room bay was removed so that the porch roof could slope over it. And a stained glass panel over the front door was removed and replaced by clear glass to allow more light to enter the vestibule under the tower.

The quality of porch construction was considerably lower than that of the house itself, nor were the porches really connected to the fabric of the main house. That made them vulnerable and during the mansion’s long sleep after the Mallorys left in 1909, these new porches collapsed --- only to be restored by Ott Brown shortly before his death, after which both the house and those newly restored porches were demolished.

As most of us in Chariton know, the Ilion had a sad end. Smith H. Mallory died here on 26 March 1903 --- still one of Iowa’s richest men; but his trusted associated Frank Crocker, in the years after Smith’s death, speculated extravagantly with the Mallory bank assets and after Frank killed himself in November 1907, it was discovered that the bank was ruined --- and along with it many Lucas Countyans.

After protracted and bitter legal battles, Annie and Jessie Mallory fled Chariton finally for Florida in 1909, taking a substantial fortune and much of the Ilion’s contents with them. To settle massive lawsuits, they deeded to the family bank’s federal receivers the Ilion, its 1,000-acre farm and other real estate in the county.

Although it took more than 40 years, that doomed the mansion. It was never lived in fully again although farm workers were housed in it by Eikenberry and Bussell, who bought the property from bank receivers, until it became unfit to live in. Ott Brown brought the property from the Eikenberry and Bussell estates in 1949 and set about putting the house in order, even renting it out to a few families, but then he died. His heirs were interested in locating a housing subdivision on the Ilion grounds, not in the old house itself; and so down it came. Lucas County’s grandest home had stood for only about 80 years.