Feature Story
The Trees of Treloar T
housands of riders from around Missouri and the world pass by the Treloar Trailhead on the Katy Trail every year. What if every single visitor left Treloar inspired to plant trees? That’s the goal of the Trees of Treloar! Much of the landscape that the Katy Trail traverses is near the Missouri River. The vast, fertile fields of the river bottom near Treloar are now planted to corn and soybeans, but that was not always the case. Before the river was straightened, channelized, and secured by levees a century ago, it wandered over flat river bottoms. It was a land of dense and varied forests, not cropland that Lewis and Clark found when they came upriver.
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CONSERVATION FEDERATION
Today remnants of the old forests can still be seen from the Katy Trail. Huge oaks, pecans and cottonwoods dot the river bottom landscape. Whether they are called wolf trees or line trees, these sentinels are always majestic. They have witnessed history we can only read about. Centuries ago, they saw the lives of the Osage and other native peoples unfold and sheltered soldiers from both sides of the Civil War as they floated past or camped beneath their canopy. On the site of the old Treloar Bar and Grill — the “town center” of Treloar for decades — the Trees of Treloar was created. The old bar had fallen into disrepair and was beyond saving - its former site found a new calling as a native tree arboretum.
