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How many times have you and I fallen into the trap of believing that “The grass is greener on the other side of the fence”… or “Away is better”? With the hard economic times I think people are remembering what fun it is to explore their own back yards. In doing so we are discovering that we don’t really have to go far from home to find beauty and adventure. We have wonderful things to learn about our land and many things to see and do within a day’s drive of home.
Take western Wisconsin for example… When Steve and I headed out of our driveway to begin a short vacation a few weeks ago, we said to each other, “No matter where we go the next few days, we will not find any prettier country than right here in coulee country.” We were right, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have some really cool stuff to see and experience.
The next few weeks here in the “In The Garden” feature of the R&BT website, I will share some of the pictures and memories of our road trip “In Our Own Back Yard”.
Laura… Again!
It has been a Laura Ingalls Wilder kind of year for me. In March we visited her home in Mansfield, Missouri, and as serendipity would have it, our little road trip “In Our Own Back Yard” this July had a Laura surprise in it is as well!
We knew we would be passing through Pepin, Wisconsin, on the Great River Road. Laura’s first home in the “Big Woods” was located close to the town of Pepin. There is a small museum and historical marker in Pepin so we stopped to take a picture of that.
On we went down the Great River Road, but our eventual destination was Decorah, Iowa. Our plan was to visit the Norwegian American Museum there as well some other points of interest around Decorah which is in the Northeast corner of Iowa. We knew that it was an easy 3-4 hour drive, so we were not pressed for time and we made up our meandering route as we went.
I was the navigator, and as I studied the atlas, I started to laugh. Guess where the our road to Decorah took us? Right past Burr Oak, Iowa.
Any of you Laura Ingalls Wilder fans out there will easily recognize the name. Burr Oak is the town that the Ingalls lived in when Laura was small. Pa and Ma (and Laura and Mary as well) helped Mr. Masters run a hotel there. Burr Oak was one more of the places that I hoped to visit someday, and without even planning it, here we were.
It wasn’t hard to find the little museum - Burr Oak is a small town. A tour of the Master’s hotel was just beginning, so we went across the street to a small clapboard building and joined the group.
The hotel is original, and it is so small it is hard to believe that it could ever functioned as a hotel. It is built into a side hill, so the back of the building is bigger than the front. The kitchen and dining room are on the walkout lower level. There are 4 rooms and a landing on the second floor – those were the rooms for hire. Two doors led into the hotel, one led to the saloon and was for men only. The other door opened into the parlor where women and children were welcomed. The other two rooms on the main level were the living quarters for Mr. Masters and his family.
For the first few months back in 1886 the Ingalls family lived in a small bedroom off the kitchen on the lower level. As time went on, Pa and Ma became increasingly concerned about the girls being so close to the saloon, so eventually they moved above the grocery store down the street, and then to a small house.
Our guide was wonderful. Her narrative made the Masters Hotel and the town of Burr Oak in 1886 come alive for us. Most of the really important “Laura artifacts” like Pa’s fiddle are found at Mansfield, Missouri, and DeSmet, South Dakota. But Burr Oak is a little gem of a museum. With its furnishings and displays, the excellent guide who painted a vivid picture of Burr Oak in 1886 and the Ingalls’ life there, this piece of Laura’s life came alive for me.
Back when Pa and Ma and the girls lived in this little frontier town, it was on a major wagon route. America was on the move. Emigrants passed through Burr Oak as they traveled from here to there, looking for their own place to call home. At the height of this time in America’s pioneer past, there were sometimes 200 wagons going through the town every day.
Times were hard, and Pa needed work. So when Mr. Masters offered him the chance to run the hotel with him, and it meant a place for Ma and the girls to live, he agreed to go. In those days you did what you had to do to survive. The work you found might not always be to your liking, but as Ma would tell Laura over the years, “You cut the coat to fit the cloth.” You took life as it came with its trials and hard ships and faced it with courage and determination to win out. That is the pioneer spirit that built America.
It didn’t take long for the Ingalls to realize that Burr Oak just wasn’t going to be what they wanted for their family. But the experience of those short to years added to Laura’s pioneer story, and helped to shape her and her family’s lives.
We met Laura fans that day in Burr Oak who were making the trek to all of Laura’s home places. They had traveled from DeSmet, to Burr Oak, up to Pepin, and still planned to go to Walnut Grove, Minnesota. I didn’t hear if Mansfield was also part of their “Laura Vacation” this summer. As I eavesdropped on their family discussions, I gathered that the children were just as interested in all things Laura as were the parents.
I have been thinking again about my fascination with Laura and her life. What draws me and people like me to the stories of this little pioneer girl’s life? Our guide told us that there are annual “Laura conventions” held every year. She had just returned from one, and told us about the fascinating study and scholarship that still surrounds Laura and her books.
What is it that we love about Laura? For me, it is because I love history, but Laura is more than just a fact out of a history book on America’s past to me. I began reading the Little House books when I was very young, and my mother read them to me before I could read them for myself. Laura comes alive in those books, and because of her story, America’s pioneer past becomes real as well.
There in little Burr Oak, Iowa I could clearly imagine the past. I could hear the clip clop of horses and oxen’s feet and the squeak of innumerable wheels traveling, traveling, traveling to a better life – just down the road or just around the bend. It reminded me of my own grandpa’s stories of growing up in pioneer days. He remembered traveling in a covered wagon as a boy. His story (and thus MY story) became more real as I imagined my grandpa’s family joining the long line of emigrants patiently plodding down the road through a place like Burr Oak.
Our serendipitous visit to Burr Oak became one of the highlights of the vacation. I loved it.
And would you believe this? On the way home we decided to get off the river road and go the “back roads” that, you guessed it, took us right by the spot where Laura was born in 1876!
The original Ingalls home site is in Pepin county, not very many miles from where we live. I wandered around the wayside, and tried to see it as it had been when Laura was small. The Big Woods of Wisconsin are long gone. Sweeping cornfields and tidy farm sites stretch in every direction as far as the eye can see. The dark woods full of shadows, wild animals and trees so close together that “a squirrel could travel from tree top to tree top from there to Canada” are gone. The stumps Laura and Mary and their cousins played on in their front yard are gone. The road still goes past their front door leading to the little town of Pepin she visited as a little girl.
When I got home I got out Laura’s biography written by Donald Zochert and reread it. It is called simply “Laura”. Zochert writes the book in a lovely style that echoes Laura’s own charming way of telling stories. What a joy it was to be able to put my own memory pictures into the descriptions of places where Laura lived.
And how thrilling it is to realize that it all happened “in our own backyard.”
How many times have you and I fallen into the trap of believing that “The grass is greener on the other side of the fence”… or “Away is better”? With the hard economic times I think people are remembering what fun it is to explore their own back yards. In doing so we are discovering that we don’t really have to go far from home to find beauty and adventure. We have wonderful things to learn about our land and many things to see and do within a day’s drive of home.
Take western Wisconsin for example… When Steve and I headed out of our driveway to begin a short vacation a few weeks ago, we said to each other, “No matter where we go the next few days, we will not find any prettier country than right here in coulee country.” We were right, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have some really cool stuff to see and experience.
The next few weeks here in the “In The Garden” feature of the R&BT website, I will share some of the pictures and memories of our road trip “In Our Own Back Yard”.
Laura...Again!
It has been a Laura Ingalls Wilder kind of year for me. In March we visited her home in Mansfield, Missouri, and as serendipity would have it, our little road trip “In Our Own Back Yard” this July had a Laura surprise in it is as well!
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