Laura Ingalls Wilder Week

When LAURA INGALLS WILDER started writing her classic "Little House" book series in 1932, she had no idea of creating fame for herself or the places where she had lived. She wrote simply to preserve tales of a lost era in American history, the pioneer period she vividly recalled from her growing-up years on the midwestern frontier in the 1870's and 1880's. When Laura completed her eight-volume series in 1943, she had achieved a lasting and substantial literary picture of pioneer life as she had experienced it in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, and South Dakota.

"I had no idea I was writing history," Laura remarked when her books were well known both in America and in foreign countries where they were translated. (The books are now printed in over 40 languages.) But readers of all ages accepted the Ingalls and Wilder families as chosen friends. Thousands wrote to Laura at her home on Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri. Fans sought out the sites of her books and stopped to visit her in her Ozark Mountain home, right up to her death in 1957 at the age of 90.

The visiting still goes on. Immediately after Laura's death, the home she and her husband Almanzo built was preserved and opened for readers. In De Smet, South Dakota, a Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society was founded to offer history and hospitality to increasing numbers of summer tourists. Through the years, each of the book sites has joined the ranks of literary-historical spots dedicated to the pioneering spirit and writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

"The Wilder Trail" begins at Pepin, Wisconsin (Little House in the Big Woods), treks south to Independence, Kansas (Little House on the Prairie), heads north to Walnut Grove, Minnesota (On the Banks of Plum Creek) and further west to De Smet, South Dakota (Little Town on the Prairie). Other restored sites include the Masters Hotel at Burr Oak, Iowa, where the Ingallses lived in 1876 and the Almanzo Wilder Home (Farmer Boy).

Laura would be pleased at the commemoration of her family, her books and the pioneer history she painstakingly recorded. She would be gratified her present-day friends in her old hometowns keep the doors open to the places she called "The Land of Used-to-Be". For you who come to visit, may this photographic journey provide a happy remembrance of what Laura Ingalls Wilder called "stories that were too good to be lost".