Although there's neither trace nor collective memory of it now, Chariton once was the site of an orchard of some 80 acres, considered at its peak during the late 1880s and 1890s to have been one of Iowa's largest commercial apple-growing operations.
The orchard was the brainchild of entrepreneur Smith H. Mallory and was located on Brook Farm, the 1,000-acre estate that extended north from his mansion (above), called the Ilion and located in a park that encompassed what now is the Ilion Acres subdivision on Chariton's north edge.
I'm not exactly sure where the orchard was located, but believe it to have been west and northwest of the Ilion grounds --- Reynolds Athletic Field and the Chariton Middle School are located on a portion of the site now.
The orchard was developed for Mallory by a gentleman named Andrew Jackson Phenix (1823-1884), who began work during the spring of 1877 with a six-year plan to develop an 80-acre commercial operation, primarily apple, within six years.
By the time Lucas County's 1881 history was written, 68 acres had been planted and work was continuing on the balance.
By 1895, The Chariton Patriot was able to report in its edition of Oct. 10: "S.H. Mallory shipped, last week, from his Brook farm orchard, the second installment of one thousand barrels of choice hand picked apples and will have another shipment of same amount before the season closes. For several weeks, 25 pickers have been constantly employed in preparing this large crop of fruit for market, the picking, barreling and shipping are under the immediate supervision of Mr. D.J. Thayer."
Thayer was Mallory's son-in-law, a civil engineer turned farm manager.
The rest of the Mallory story is well known in Lucas County. Smith Mallory died in 1903. In 1907, a trusted associate broke the family bank by speculating with its funds and during 1909, in order to settle claims of the federal bank receiver, Annie Mallory and Jessie (Mallory) Thayer, widow and daughter, turned over all their assets in Lucas County and fled to Florida. That included both Brook Farm and Ilion house.
Both farm and house were sold to business partners William A. Eikenberry and Luther H. Busselle, who decided during 1911 to get rid of the orchard, which hadn't been cared for properly in several years, and plant the ground to corn.
On the 28th of March, 1912, the Herald-Patriot reported the result of that decision on its front page under the headline, "Ilion Orchard Cut Down." And that was the end of one of Iowa's largest orchards.
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The immense orchard at Ilion, the former Mallory farm, now owned by Messrs. L. H. Busselle and W. A. Eikenberry, has been cut down this winter, all but a few young trees, mostly Jonathans. This was doubtless the largest orchard in southern Iowa, embracing over 60 acres and numbering over 3,,000 trees in all. Many of these trees were planted by Mr. Mallory 20 to 30 years ago, and in their prime the apples from them took many prizes at the local fairs and the Iowa state fair.
Chariton people have bought (and otherwise secured) apples from the old orchard for several decades, and the middle aged people of Chariton can hardly remember back of the time when they used to go out to Mallory's to "mark the trees" from which they would later pick their winter supply of apples. Sometimes they would find the trees still unpicked when they got there, and other times they would not.
Many of the old trees were dead, and the present owners found the orchard as a whole unprofitable, so they decided to clear it off and plant it in corn. As many has 15 men at a time have been employed in cutting down the trees during the winter, and vast quantities of good wood were secured from the cutting. Tree stump pulling machines will now be put on the job, and the land will be in fine shape to raise a big crop of corn this year.
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