On the Road with David and Rose

Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home on Rock Ridge Farm, Mansfield, MO

Before we got to Paducah, our route (Hwy 60) from OK to KY passed through Mansfield, Missouri, where Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote The Little House on the Prairie and eight other popular books .  We detoured a few miles down a country lane to visit the museum and tour the historic home on Rocky Ridge Farm. She and her husband Almanzo Wilder lived here in their later years after leaving South Dakota. 

Some of the museum facts and artifacts that caught my attention were:

• The fiddle Pa played (probably made in Germany around 1850)
• The diary Laura made of her trip from DeSmet, South Dakota, to Mansfield, Missouri
• Laura’s use of unwanted books – She pasted clips of household tips onto their pages
• She was only 4’11” tall
• She began writing the life of her family and their adventures at age 65
• She wrote her manuscripts in pencil on small tablets of paper. 

The Wilders’ white wood frame home grew from one humble room to a house with a music room, native stone fireplace, and second floor. One room captures the bucolic countryside through 11 windows. (Although the Wilders only used the upstairs for storage, their daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, enjoyed writing her novels in that room.)

Rose built a lovely English-style cottage nearby for her parents from a Sears catalogue plan.  As a freelance writer, I was struck with admiration to hear that she earned $10,000 in the 1920s for a serial of her book, Let the Hurricane Roar (now titled Young Pioneer) published in The Saturday Evening Post. To place those earnings in perspective, building and furnishing the house cost $11,000! Rose Wilder was an enviably successful writer!

Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home