Little House on the Prairie and Me

     Shortly after I got married, we went to an Ingalls family reunion. That was quite the event and that is when I realized I had married into a family with a huge legacy. I read the books as a child and fell in love with them like most girls my age. I never in a million years thought that I would marry a real life descendant of the Ingalls clan! People ask me all the time if we are related and I always take pride in being able to say, "yes"! I do have to say that the actors who played the Ingalls characters in the TV show don't look anything like the real life Ingalls!

Left to Right: Ma, Grace, Laura, Pa, Carrie, Mary

     After we were married for several years my husband decided that he wanted to visit the places where the family grew up. We first went to Pepin, Wisconsin, the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder, where we saw a replica of the log house she lived in. It was a very small house and we were all shocked at the simplicity of the home. The beautiful Mississippi river runs along the road to get there too.

Log home similar to the one in the Little House books

     Next, we visited the famous Walnut Grove in Minnesota, where the Ingalls family lived for two years and was the basis for the television show. We got to check out a dugout home similar to the one they lived in On the Banks of Plum Creek, a schoolhouse similar to the one she went to and a covered wagon.

A dugout home similar to the one described in the book On the Banks of Plum Creek

     Finally, we traveled to De Smet, South Dakota to see the place where the family traveled to in order to claim land under the Homestead Act of 1862.

De Smet home

     A few years later, I got the idea to write a book based on the Little House on the Prairie series written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, but it would be set in my time and be about my childhood and I would call it Little House in the Suburbs. It never really got any further than that until a year ago when I decided to make it into a blog instead. I have no background or training in writing so this may be uninteresting to some, but I have been an avid writer in a journal since sixth grade so at least I know my family will be interested to read this since some of them read my journals already.
     I'm really excited to see where this takes me. I am probably going to be all over the place writing about things from the past and also, because I want to write about things in the present as well. Hopefully, I can figure out a way to make sense of it all!