Good afternoon! Hope everyone is enjoying their day. The weather has been nice here in our town. A nice change from all the cold snow and ice last week. I was browsing the web for some farm pictures and I came across these that someone had took when they visited the Laura Ingall's home in Walnut Grove. There are some neat pictures and history facts here so I thought I would share with you guys. So-here's a little history lesson for the day
Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri. The home of Laura Ingalls-Wilder. This is where she wrote The Little House On The Prairie books
Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when she wrote Little House series
Near Independence, KS. A reconstruction, of course. The Ingalls family lived here from 1869 to 1871.
This is the Ingalls' plot in the De Smet cemetery (L-to-R: Carrie, Mary, baby, Ma and Pa). Laura and her husband, Almanzo, are buried near their farm in Rocky Ridge, Missouri.
This is the where the dugout home was when the Ingalls lived on the Banks of Plum Creek (she wrote a book based on her life there. I had that book as a kid-I think I still have it somewhere). This is all that is left of the dugout. It caved in some time ago.
The photographer took these pics standing at the bottom of the creek. Looking up you can see the board which is where their dugout home was.
This is the museum in Walnut Grove.
This is an actual picture of the Ingalls girls. If you ask me-they did a pretty good job when they casted the girls that played them in the tv show Little House on the Prairie.
Laura Ingalls was born in Wisconsin in the 1860s. Her parents, Charles and Caroline, moved the family around the Midwest throughout the 1870s and 1880s. During their numerous moves around the Midwest, the Ingalls lived in a sod "dugout" on Plum Creek, near the town of Walnut Grove, Minnesota.
In 1880, Charles got a job for a railroad company on the barren plains of eastern South Dakota in what is today the town of De Smet and moved his family there. Laura, who was 13 when she moved to De Smet, finished high school there and became a school teacher, married Almanzo Wilder a few years later, then moved with him to Missouri.
When Laura was in her 50's, she began writing about her childhood adventures in the various places that she'd lived. She based her book, On the Banks of Plum Creek on her experiences of living in the sod dugout near Walnut Grove, and based another book, called Little House on the Prairie, on her experiences of living in a little house -- and on the prairie, no less -- in Independence, Kansas. She based several other books, including "The Long Winter" and "On the Shores of Silver Lake," on her later experiences in De Smet, South Dakota.
In the 1970s, NBC created a television series based on Laura's childhood experiences, although the producers took some liberties with her stories. Instead of having the family live in a dirt cave, they gave the family a wooden house, called the town "Walnut Grove" (which has a better ring than "De Smet," I guess), and called the series "Little House on the Prairie," though it wasn't set anywhere near Independence, Kansas. This was an amalgam of her experiences in Kansas, Minnesota, and South Dakota.
*to credit where I got the pictures and info here is the link*
I grew up watching the t.v. shows. It was one of my favorites and I still enjoy the reruns. I hope to own the seasons on DVD one of these days. Historical events fascinate me. I hope you enjoyed this little history lesson! I live about and hour and half from Laura's home in Mansfield. I've been to it as a kid. We took a class trip there in elementary. I hope to go back some day with my family.
Take care and God bless!
