A Guide to theLaura’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Sites Little Houses The Notgrass Family A GuideLaura’s to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Sites Little Houses Ray and Charlene Notgrass John Notgrass, Bethany Poore, and Mary Evelyn McCurdy Laura’s Little Houses: A Guide to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Sites Cover and Interior Design by Mary Evelyn McCurdy Copyright © 2013 Notgrass Company. All rights reserved. You may print a copy of this ebook for your own personal use, but no part of this material may be redistributed in any format. If you wish to share the material with your friends, please give them this link to download their own copy of the ebook: notgrass.com/laura Book Credits Little House® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. This ebook is not endorsed by or associated with HarperCollins in any way. Book quotations are taken from the following titles by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published by HarperCollins or its subsidiaries. Little House in the Big Woods. Copyright © 1932, 1960 Little House Heritage Trust. Little House on the Prairie. Copyright © 1935, 1963 Little House Heritage Trust. On the Banks of Plums Creek. Copyright © 1937, 1965 Little House Heritage Trust. By the Shores of Silver Lake. Copyright © 1937, 1965 Little House Heritage Trust. Little Town on the Prairie. Copyright © 1941 Laura Ingalls Wilder. Copyright renewed 1969 Roger Lea MacBride. Farmer Boy. Copyright © 1933 Laura Ingalls Wilder. Copyright renewed 1961 Roger Lea MacBride. These Happy Golden Years. Copyright © 1943 Laura Ingalls Wilder. Copyright renewed 1971 Roger Lea MacBride. Image Credits All images are from the Notgrass family collection except: cover David Hepworth (Flickr, CC BY 2.0); 1/top Wikimedia Commons; 3/top amrit1983 (Flickr, CC BY 2.0); 4 Eleanor Bradley; 5 TheSeafarer (Flickr, CC BY 2.0); 12/top mhowry (Flickr, CC BY 2.0); 16, 17 Jo Naylor (Flickr, CC BY 2.0); 19, 20 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Images marked CC BY 2.0 are licensed through the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License. For more information, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en BestTrips.guide is our website that allows us to keep the links in this guide up to date. As you browse this PDF file, simply click on a light blue link to go to a website. The listings and Internet links in this book are provided for your information and convenience. Our company does not endorse the organizations, events, or advertisements you may encounter through this guide. If you find a link that does not take you to the correct site, please let us know. Teaching the Heart, Soul, and Mind™ 1-800-211-8793 [email protected] www.notgrass.com Dedicated to the volunteers, associations, and businesses who maintain the historic sites associated with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family. You are preserving history for all of us and promoting the values Laura cherished. We appreciate you. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote, “I lived everything that happened in my books.” The Little House books provide a true pictureTimeline of Laura’s experiences asof a pioneer girl.Laura’s She chose to omit some periodsLittle from her family’sHouses history in her Little House stories, so there are some differences in the timeline portrayed in the books and the actual timeline of Laura’s life. These are the places she lived. 1867 • Laura Ingalls is born near Pepin, Wisconsin. 1868 • Laura and the Ingalls family move to Chariton County, Missouri. 1869 • Laura and the Ingalls family move to Montgomery County, near Independence, Kansas. 1871 • Laura and the Ingalls family move back to Pepin, Wisconsin. 1874 • Laura and the Ingalls family move to Walnut Grove, Minnesota. 1876 • Laura and the Ingalls family move to Burr Oak, Iowa. 1878 • Laura and the Ingalls family move back to Walnut Grove, Minnesota. 1879 • Laura and the Ingalls family move to De Smet, Dakota Territory. 1885 • Laura marries Almanzo Wilder and moves to his homestead claim near De Smet, Dakota Territory. 1890 • Laura and Almanzo Wilder and their daughter Rose (born 1886) live with Almanzo’s parents at their farm in Spring Valley, Minnesota. 1891 • Laura, Almanzo, and Rose move to Westville, Florida. 1892 • Laura, Almanzo, and Rose move back to De Smet, South Dakota. 1894 • Laura, Almanzo, and Rose move to Mansfield, Missouri. “Home is the nicest~Laura word Ingalls there Wilder is.” 1. Pepin, Wisconsin ........................2 2. Chariton County, Missouri .......4 3. Independence, Kansas ...............5 The 4. Walnut Grove, MinnesotaSites .........6 5. Burr Oak, Iowa ...........................8 6. De Smet, South Dakota ...........10 7. Spring Valley, Minnesota .........14 8. Westville, Florida ......................15 9. Mansfield, Missouri ..................16 10. Malone, New York ....................18 11. Vinton, Iowa ..............................19 12. Keystone, South Dakota ..........20 10 1 12 6 4 7 5 11 2 3 9 8 A Reconstruction of the Ingalls’ Little House on the Prairie in Kansas Several of the sites described in this book are only open seasonally. Please call or visit a location’s website before planning a trip! When Laura Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder became engaged, he promised to build her a house on his claim. “It will have to be a little house,” he told her. “Do you mind?” “I have always lived in little houses.Introduction I like them,” Laura answered. Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in many different little houses in many different places during her long, fascinating life. Laura was a farmer’s daughter and a farmer’s wife. The Ingalls and Wilder families were pioneers, part of the westward migration that went by covered wagon to new, unsettled territory to build homes and turn the land into productive farms. As an elderly woman living happily at Rocky Ridge Farm, Laura sat with pencil and five-cent lined school tablets and wrote the story of her childhood and early adulthood that we now treasure as the Little House books. The first, Little House in the Big Woods, was Laura Ingalls Wilder published in 1932. Young readers were hooked and begged for more. My mother began reading the Little House books to my brother and sister and me when I was in the 4th or 5th grade. I remember the little group of us sitting around on the living room carpet full of enjoyment as she read. Most vividly, I remember laughing to split our sides at the antics of Almanzo and his siblings while their parents were out of town as told in the “Keeping House” chapter of Farmer Boy. I love the Little House books. My family read them aloud, and I have read them myself again and again since that first time. The scenes and settings are so vivid, they are more like my own memories than things I read in books: making maple sugar at Grandpa’s, Ma slapping a bear thinking it was a cow, Laura going alone into dangerously deep water, the infuriating Nellie Oleson, the heartbreaking implications of Mary’s blindness, the death of Jack the good bulldog, the bumping of the wagon over the wild prairie, the passing flocks of birds, the howl of wolves, the blast of blizzards, and the beautiful, longing music of Pa’s fiddle. For my family, they are more than books; they are guides to marriage and child-raising, models of hard work and contentment, pictures of commitment and love of family. Please give the children in your life the gift of Little House before childhood passes. Read them again or for the first time as an adult. Read them aloud to your children and to your grandchildren. Laugh together over slippery parlor furniture, leeches all over Nellie’s legs, and a stray cat climbing up Laura’s hoop skirt. Huddle together in the back kitchen through a blizzard, wait together anxiously for Pa to return from a trip to town, and work together to save for Mary’s college tuition. Listen together to Pa playing his fiddle. And if you love Laura, take your experience a step further and visit the places where her little houses stand or once stood. The grassy prairies, the murmuring creeks, and the vast skies she describes so beautifully in her books are real places—places that readers can visit to get to know Laura and her world better. Laura is so well-known and widely-loved that all of the places she lived have a marker of some sort, from a simple sign to a museum complex with multiple preserved structures. Laura Ingalls Wilder gave us a gift to treasure—her family’s story. Loyal “Laura fans” give us the gift of preserving her homeplaces. We, the recipients of these gifts, have much to be thankful for and so much wonder to anticipate. Bethany Poore Street Signs in De Smet, South Dakota Laura’s Little Houses: A Guide to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Sites © 2013 Notgrass Company 1 1 Pepin, Little House in the Big Woods On FebruaryWisconsin 7, 1867, in a small log cabin in the Big Woods near Pepin, Wisconsin, Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their two-year-old daughter Mary welcomed baby Laura into their family. In Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in the Little House series, Laura Ingalls Wilder introduces children to the long-ago way of life she knew in her own childhood. She carefully explains the details of life in the sparsely populated woods of Wisconsin, from raising and preserving food, to the wonderful “sugaring off” dance at Grandpa’s, to her family’s happy, simple Christmas celebration. What Can YouLittle See House WaysideThere Today? The Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society of Pepin owns three acres of the land that was part of the farm once owned by Charles and Caroline Ingalls.