16 Oct 2004 Frank This is going to be GREAT ! I've thought for years the citizens of Lucas County missed a tremendous opportunity to promote it's fine heritage by letting this beautiful home torn be down. It, today, should be the proud home of the Lucas County Historical Society and could well house the Lucas County Genealogical Society as well. I too was at that final open house in 1955 and, like you, don't remember a great deal about the day. I was 14 years old at the time. I do, however, remember a bit more from other days prior to that. My mother belonged to a social club called "The Sunshine Workers Club" which is still in existence in Chariton. One of the members of that club lived in "Mallory Castle" (as it was known) for a time and I can remember going there with mother to her club meetings. On at least one of those occasions I recall climbing up into that "forbidden" tower and roaming all over the many, many empty rooms throughout the house. It was one spectacular place in it's day. Tons and tons of solid walnut paneling everywhere. After it was razed, the property was sub-divided and a number of homes were built to create what is now known as Ilion Acres. My in-laws built a new home in 1960 on the portion of that sub-division where the castle sat. Nice ranch-style home but it pales in comparison to what was there before. I'm alternatingly sad and mad everytime I think about "Mallory Castle." Gary W. Tharp Long Beach, CA [email protected] -------Original Message------- From: Frank Myers Date: 10/16/04 15:31:01 To: [email protected] Subject: [IALUCAS] Smith Henderson Mallory Part 1 WHY IN THE WOULD SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT SMITH H. MALLORY? A friend asked me last week out of the blue, "Why in the world did they tear Mallory's Castle down?" He was referring to the mansion on what now is Chariton's north edge known formally as "Ilion," constructed during 1879 by Smith Henderson Mallory and demolished during 1955. Chariton, Iowa for that matter, came late to an appreciation of historic preservation, so it is not really surprising that S.H. Mallory's grand Italianate home (and many other Lucas County landmarks) fell as the decades passed. However, the loss during the same year of the Ilion and the equally magnificent St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, also in large part a Mallory project, was a double disaster. St. Andrew's fell victim to a small congregation and dry rot, generating in the early 1950s an impossible repair bill estimate in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it safe, so its demise was inevitable. Ilion, on the other hand, was sold as the rock that formed its foundation, but it was impossibly large and inconvenient by mid-20th century standards and hadn't been fully lived in since 1907 when S.H. Mallory's widow, Annie, and daughter, Jessie, fled to Florida after Frank Crocker broke their bank, First National, and them - an accomplishment that once must have seemed impossible. The Mallorys entered my consciousness during 1955 when I accompanied my parents, Daniel and Reefa (Miller) Myers, and Dad's cousin, Edwin Johnson, and his wife, Betty (Marquis) Johnson, to a public open house at the Ilion that preceded by a few days the start of its demolition. The Chariton Rotary Club had held a grand farewell ball at the Ilion a few days earlier with both Iowa's governor, Leo A. Hoegh, and Charles F. Wennerstrum, chief justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, both of whom were Chariton residents, in attendance. I was too young to remember much about the open house. I recall cars parked in every direction on the grounds, the huge (to young eyes) southwest first-floor room, the ballroom, which I recall as having a green marble floor (but I don't think it really did), the grand staircase, the approach stairs to the tower (we were forbidden to use them), a dark first-floor hallway with an harmonium parked against one wall, glimpses into other rooms and the basement, where a tour guide told small children like myself that built-in storage places for fruit and vegetables actually had been used for corpse storage. My late parents should have remembered more (I always thought). Their friends, Victor and Fern Johnson, lived in (or camped out in portions of) the Ilion when Victor farmed the place and they had visited them there. But they really didn't - hadn't really thought much about the old barn, other than the fact it was very difficult to heat and filled with whispers. If Lucas County ever had a Renaissance man, it probably was Smith Henderson Mallory. A failure to reproduce enthusiastically may have denied him the publicity he deserves. He had one daughter only, Jessie, and she had no children. So there really was no one to perpetuate his memory. And with one exception, the landmarks associated with Mallory, including his grave, have vanished from Lucas County. The exception is the clock in the Lucas County Courthouse tower, brought home from the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and given as a gift by Mallory to the people of Lucas County. To entertain myself, I've pulled together a few things I have on the gentleman, who deserves better, and propose to share them with you here, in several parts. Gary Tharp postcards, accessible thanks to Gary and David on the Lucas County USGenWeb site, will give you an idea of what both Ilion (S.H. Mallory Residence) and St. Andrews looked like. The photos upon which the Ilion postcards were based were taken after 1894 when elaborate porches were wrapped around the house both to facilitate porch parties and make entrance to the house easier on guests. The original design included only a porch to the right of the tower, fronting the windows of the home's parlor and wrapping around the east side of this part of the house to include an elaborate solarium and cover a secondary entrance just north of the parlor. Originally, the main entrance at the base of the tower had no covering, so guests who arrived in bad weather were dripped on, although a canvas canopy shows in some earlier photos, apparently an effort to rectify this problem. The solarium also had a substantially more elaborate roof when the house first was built, so this had been replaced by 1894. The drawing room, or ballroom, was to the left of the tower, in the southwest corner of the house To the north were the dining room, library and stair hall. Beyond the main block of the house, to the north, was a slightly lower kitchen wing that included quarters for servants. And north of the kitchen wing was an attached, drive-through carriage house, quite progressive for its day. Each of the major rooms had an elaborate fireplace, but it isn't known if the home's central heating system was installed when it was built or somewhat later. Only the finest materials reportedly were used, and those who saw and remembered the chimney pieces, floors, paneling, built-in cupboards and other woodwork say all of it was a sight to behold. Beyond the the postcards, three published biographies of Smith H. Mallory are available online, courtesy of the Iowa Biography Project. David has a link to the 1881 history of Lucas County, and to the Mallory sketch, on the Lucas County page. A longer sketch from the 1896 "A Memorial and Biographical Record of Iowa" and a very short 1903 sketch from Vol. 4 of History of Iowa from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century" may be accessed via the "State" as opposed to "County" link on the biography project home page. Don't judge Smith H. by the giddy self-promotion apparently evident in some of these sketches. By all accounts he was a modest man who headed a friendly family that lived very well indeed, but could afford to do so. These biographies were of the vanity-press genre, composed by a stable of writers who embroidered facts provided by the subjects, great and small, with the goal of making them all sound great. Assuming you'll read those immediately, I'll post next Mr. Mallory's death notice, then (after I've had a chance to proofread the monster again), one of his obituaries. Frank D. Myers October 2004 ==== IALUCAS Mailing List ==== David, [email protected]: Lucas County List Administrator, Website Coordinator, Lucas County IA Genweb - http://www.rootsweb com/~ialucas/Main.htm ============================== Gain access to over two billion names including the new Immigration Collection with an Ancestry.com free trial. Click to learn more. http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=4930&sourceid=1237