KWQC-TV6 Features Writer Fran Riley returned to Morrison’s Heritage Museum, 202 E. Lincolnway, Morrison, IL, on Monday, October 9, 2017, for an interview with Historical Society Trustee Stephanie Vavra. His interview focused on this year’s Sesquicentennial birthday of beloved author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Riley previously interviewed Board President Harvey Zuidema.
Vavra’s interview will be broadcast Tuesday, October 10, at 4:00 p.m., on Channel 6. It will be rebroadcast twice, Riley stated, on Wednesday, October 11, at 4:30 or 4:45 a.m. and noon.
Vavra shared her fondness for the “Little House” series of nine, historical fiction novels and the characters that live within them. Having read the books repeatedly while raising her children and teaching others’, the “Ingalls and Wilder families seen like good friends” to her. She visited all the home sites and, like Laura, returned to several on more than one occasion.
A highlight was a bus trip to Malone, NY, birthplace of Almanzo James Wilder, in late 2007, to celebrate the Sesquicentennial birth of Laura’s husband in 1857. Dean Butler–who portrayed Almanzo in the television series “Little House on the Prairie”–was on hand to film a documentary about the home of “Farmer Boy” A. J. Wilder. On the trip, outside Danbury, CT, Vavra walked up the driveway of the last home of Rose Wilder Lane to take a photograph. Lane was an accomplished writer and assisted her mother with editing and marketing Laura’s work. Lane used her mother’s material to craft three pioneer novels, before Laura had written the novels that made her a literary phenomenon: Let the Hurricane Roar, Free Land, and Young Pioneers. In one, Lane used the names Charles and Caroline for her protagonists!
Items in Vavra’s collection represent aspects of pioneer life, as described in rich detail in the series. While teaching at Prophetstown Grade School, giving program talks, and hosting Pioneer Day Camp sessions for three years at Heritage Canyon, she incorporated candle, lye soap, bread, butter, genealogy chart, and quilt block making into the curriculum.
Laura Elizabeth Ingalls was born February 7, 1867, under a 36-star United States flag, two years after the conclusion of the American Civil War. She lived 90 years and three days, having experienced migrations to, and settlement of, the Midwestern Plains and Ozark Mountains. Her travels display a road map across seven states and include return stays in Wisconsin, Missouri, Minnesota, and South Dakota.
As child (of Charles and Caroline Ingalls) and spouse (of Almanzo Wilder) Laura lived in a cabin outside Pepin, WI; at an unidentified stopover in Missouri; on the Osage Indian Reserve in Kansas; in her original home near Pepin; inside a dugout and then a wood frame house outside Walnut Grove, MN; in the Masters Hotel, rooms above a grocery store, and in a rented brick house in Burr Oak, IA; in a house in the town of Walnut Grove; in a Surveyors’ House, claim shanty, and her father’s town building built to sell, (all before her marriage) and a claim shanty and house on a tree claim with her husband in De Smet, SD; with her in-laws in Spring Valley, MN; in a rental house in Westville, FL; in a De Smet rented house in town; in a cabin on their Mansfield, MO, property, in a town rental house, and then in a spacious, two-story home the Wilders built from their timber and stones.
Laura Ingalls Wilder found her final home on “Rocky Ridge Farm” and resided there from 1894 until her death, on February 10, 1957. Each year, her birthday is celebrated around the world.
To extend their interest, Wilder fans may wish to
- join the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association, www.beyondlittlehouse.com/about-2/join/. Memberships run January through December at $15.
- purchase Pioneer Girl The Annotated Autobiography for $39.95: 472 pages, 125 images, and eight maps. https://pioneergirlproject.org/order/order-pioneer-girl–the-annotated-autobiography/.
- purchase Who Really Saved Laura Ingalls: Soldat du Chene or a soldat du chien? by Stephanie A. Vavra: Illinois residents $4.25/Iowa residents $4: non-fiction essay, 9 pages. vavra@mchsi.com.