Laura Ingalls Museum

Laura Ingalls Wilder probably never dreamed how popular her books would become. Over 40 million copies have sold and children have been learning about Laura’s life for nearly 100 years. Fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder can visit not one, but five, museums in five states!

Fun Facts

• Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867 in Pepin, Wisconsin, which is where the book Little House in the Big Woods takes place. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum here features a re-creation of the cabin she lived in with her family.

  

• The Ingalls family moved to Independence, Kansas in 1869. Fans can visit a re-created cabin there at the site believed to have been the Ingalls’s property.
• The Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota features a dugout house, a school house, an early settler home, and a covered wagon. Laura’s family moved here in 1874.

  

• The Ingalls moved to DeSmet, South Dakota, and Charles Ingalls built their final home there in 1887. The home still stands, along with several buildings featured in Little Town on the Prairie.

  
  

• Laura Ingalls Wilder settled in Mansfield, Missouri with her husband Almanzo. A museum at their beloved farm Rocky Ridge Farm holds the largest collection of Laura’s personal items and books.

 

Vocabulary

1. Re-creation: an authentic and accurate copy of something
2. Popular: liked by many

 

Questions and Answers

Question: Why did Laura’s family move so much?

Answer: Laura’s father had an adventurous frontier spirit and didn’t care for crowds so he was always excited to discover new lands and opportunities.

Another reason they frequently moved though was because of financial hardship and ruin. In Walnut Grove, for example, locusts destroyed their crops two years in a row and Laura’s baby brother died.

As an adult, Laura experienced hard times too. During her early marriage, Laura and Almanzo’s crops were destroyed by drought or hail for three years. Their barn and their house burned down and their first child died.

They both got diphtheria, a serious disease, which left Almanzo with a limp for the rest of his life. Still, Laura and Almanzo were happy and they loved farming. Laura published her first story when she was sixty-five years old.

 

Learn More

Read more about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life.