On this day in 1911...
2/18/1911 – Laura launches her professional writing career as a columnist and later as the Home Editor for the Missouri Ruralist. She works for the newspaper through the mid-1920s.
One hundred and ten years later...
I never imagined I’d actually get to visit any of the Little House sites, but in 2015 now having been to Pepin, Walnut Grove, De Smet, Burr Oak, and Spring Valley all in 2015, it shouldn’t be surprising that in 2018 I finally made it to Rocky Ridge, in Mansfield Missouri! Rocky Ridge is where Laura’s writing career began, and ended up being the place where she lived the longest and eventually died in February of 1957. We also went to Independence, KS, incidentally, on that same trip, when I realized how close we would get to it - after Rocky Ridge and before Texas - for Joe’s turf conference.
Three years later, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I am now making my family go to the Wilder Florida home site as well.
I should probably back up here. With Covid 2020 being the weirdest year anyone alive can remember, we decided in November to buy an RV for our annual treks during spring break. Not only did it seem like a good year to travel, but a good time to take stock and look around at the world we now live in. We’d always said we’d get a camper and drive around the country when we were old, but we felt so repressed by all the stay at home orders last spring and just talked about it some more. We realized we should do this with the kids, because they love traveling too, so why wait?
The area in Florida we are headed for is in the panhandle, and I’m excited to see what it’s like there. The Almanzo Wilders spent about a year homesteading near Westville, FL after suffering several losses in De Smet and a year recouping in Spring Valley. They hoped the weather in Florida would be good for Manly’s health after suffering from a debilitating bout of diphtheria; it was anything but. His health didn’t improve, and Laura disliked the swampy forests and slow, muddy rivers. She wrote about her time there:... “we went to live in the piney woods of Florida, where the trees always murmur, where the butterflies are enormous, where plants that eat insects grow in moist places, where alligators inhabit the slowly moving waters of the rivers. But at the time and at that place a Yankee woman was more of a curiosity than these...”
A yankee in Florida is no longer a curiosity, but it sounds as if at that time Laura stuck out like a sore thumb. She was used to the plains with their hot winds, open prairie, and clear lakes. Florida must be just the opposite, and I can imagine her hesitation, being from Michigan, where a swampy area is generally considered to be a bad spot to live, let alone farm.
We are only just starting out on this Laura trip as I write. For our first night we stayed at a hotel in Plymouth, Indiana. Pool was closed and I didn’t have a great night’s sleep I always forget that it takes a few days to unwind and get in trip mode. Next morning we got a spectacular family picture outside the Minnie Winnie, got coffee at Mac-D’s, and took off.
We drove a solid 4-5 hours the second day and stayed at a Holiday Inn Express in Kentucky, where the pool was open and we all went in!
Next morning, that’s right, to another McDonalds for coffee to go with our RV breakfast. We only had to drive about 3.5 hours to get to Birmingham, AL, for nights 3 and 4. We will stay at Oak Park Mountain Campground, about 15 minutes from our friends, the Halls. Can’t wait to visit with them!
🎉🥰
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