General Douglas MacArthur catalpa - Jeffersontown, Kentucky

A tree traceable to General Douglas MacArthur was planted at Veterans Park in Jeffersontown, Kentucky in December 1998 to memorialize the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Stan LeMaster, a WWII veteran, retrieved some Catalpa seeds from the army barracks in Little Rock, Arkansas where MacArthur's parents lived when he was born.  Stan started growing the trees in Jefferson County, Kentucky at his partner Theodore Klein's Crestwood Kentucky nursery.

Stan long had an interest in the outspoken General MacArthur who swept through the South Pacific chomping on his pipe and claiming to be from Milwaukee.  Eventually Stan got a tree planted in Little Rock, Arkansas from the white pine seeds he retrieved in Wisconsin. 

Stan and his partners also had several MacArthur white pines planted which were descended from the Douglas MacArthur White Pine in Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin.  The Wisconsin pine cones had to be shot down from the top of the dying tree. 

(Some of the information in this article was gleaned from the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper article written by Scott Wade, December 7, 1998.)