Exploring Minnesota - Minnesota River Valley Trip - Walnut Grove

We drove on down the Minnesota River Valley to Walnut Grove where we took a close look at the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Does Little House on the Prairie sound familiar to you?

 

The 'Little House' Series

In the 1910s Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, by then grown up and a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin, encouraged her mother to write about her childhood. In the 1920s, Wilder's first attempt at writing an autobiography, called Pioneer Girl, was uniformly rejected by publishers. Determined to succeed, Wilder spent the next several years reworking her writing, including switching the title and changing the story to be told from the third-person perspective.

In 1932, Laura Wilder published Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in what would become an autobiographical series of children's books, collectively called the Little House books. Just as Little House in the Big Woods recounts her life in Pepin, Wisconsin, each of her books focuses on one of the more memorable places she lived. With Wilder and daughter Rose working together on the manuscripts, other books in the Little House series include Little House on the Prairie, Farmer Boy, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years. Wilder completed the last book in the series in 1943, when she was 76 years old.

At Walnut Grove, the family lived in a dugout on the banks of Plum Creek, then into a home the family built.

A replica of the dugout is found at the Museum in Walnut Grove.

The museum offered insight into life on the prairie.  

Laura was 7 years old when she lived at Walnut Grove.  She obtained her first teaching job at the age of 17.

The prairie lands of the Great Plains are shown below.  Half of Minnesota can be seen to be prairie land, the other half (to the north and east) is forest land.  Today, the Great Plains are largely planted with corn and beans.

Next stop, Ft. Ridgely on the Minnesota River.