Remembering Laura Ingalls Wilder
Collection: Mary Carttar Hartley
Title
Remembering Laura Ingalls Wilder
Subject
Hartley, Mary Carttar
Essays
Autobiographical
Description
Reminiscence of Mary Hartley's 1948 visit to Laura Ingalls Wilder at her home in Mansfield, MO.
Creator
Hartley, Mary Carttar
Source
Hartley, Mary Carttar
Publisher
Winfield Public Library, Winfield, Kansas USA
Date
ca 2000
Rights
Relation
Laura Ingalls Wilder Correspondence
Format
application/pdf
Language
English
Type
Narratives
Citation
Hartley, Mary Carttar, “Remembering Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Winfield Digital Collections, accessed December 21, 2024, https://winfield.digitalsckls.info/item/66.
Text
REMEMBERING LAURA INGALLS WILDER
by Mary Carttar Hartley
I met Laura and Mary Ingalls when I was a third grader at Stevenson School. My teacher, Almedia Greever, introduced me to the girls in 1944 when she began reading Little House in the Big Woods to our class. A lifelong interest was bom. That year I talked about Laura and Mary so much my mother asked Miss Greever if there were new
girls in my class. When my daughter received the books from her grandparents for Christmas and birthdays, she also developed a passion for the Ingalls girls. Through the years I have collected books by and about Laura Ingalls Wilder, including as many of the ones with the Helen Sewell illustrations as I could find. I had biographies, a cookbook, the Horn Book and a book of letters children had written to her. A magazine, perhaps the
original farm magazine for which she wrote, reprinted all of her columns and I dutifully
collected them. Alas, when we left Colorado and moved to our smaller home in Arizona I gave most of my books and ephemera to the Westminster, Colorado, Friends of the
Library for their annual sale, but I do still have the magazine columns.
Harriet Brooks, my sixth grade teacher, was the person who helped me recognize that real people write books and they are people we can approach. The year before I was in Mrs. Brooks’ class Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, the author of Miss Hickory, came to Winfield at Mrs. Brooks’ invitation. Our fifth grade class was invited to hear her speech. Every year Mrs. Brooks had her sixth graders write letters to their favorite authors. Not only did we use those dry lessons on letter writing that we’d practiced from our English book, we were likely to get a letter back in return for our effort. Of course I wrote to Mrs. Wilder and I received a reply. Oh, Joy! I still have the letter. It was one thing I kept when we moved. I was usually swept away by anything related to reading so I also wrote to Lois Lenski, E. B. White and Carol Ryrie Brink. I received replies from them all.
In 1948 my parents and I drove my older sister, a recent Kansas State College graduate, to New Orleans to board a plane for Bolivia where she was going to teach English at a Methodist mission school in La Paz. The summer had been focused almost entirely on her departure for an unknown world and I was ignored. Mother realized we would be going close to the Wilder home at Mansfield, Missouri, so she prevailed upon the Winfield children’s librarian, Helen Crawford, to help make arrangements for a visit with Mrs. Wilder. Miss Crawford had carried on a friendship with Mrs. Wilder through correspondence. Mother did not tell me about the visit to Mrs. Wilder until after we had started home from New Orleans. I was ecstatic and at the same time intimidated. It was one thing to write a letter, but to meet her in person was quite another.
The day we arrived at Mansfield, we asked in town for directions to the Wilder’s rural home. It was a beautiful two-story farmhouse set on a knoll well back from the road and its name was “Rocky Ridge.” We drove up a long lane to the house and walked up to a small porch at the backdoor. An old man was sitting on the porch whittling. It was
Almanzo, often called Manly by friends. We asked for Mrs. Wilder and he called into the house, “Someone to see you Bessie.” Bessie! Who was Bessie? I thought we had the wrong house. Miss Crawford explained to me when we returned home that Laura was called Bessie by her family, a nickname derived from her middle name of Elizabeth.
We walked into the home through a wonderful big kitchen that was probably the most used room in the house. It smelled of something freshly baked. We were ushered into the front room of the farmhouse, a room that was more parlor than living room and probably not used a great deal. I looked around the room and spotted the china shepherdess that figured so prominently in the Little House books. In the comer there was a small whatnot that resembled the one they made using folded newspapers in Little Town on the Prairie. In my memory of the day I thought she showed us Pa’s fiddle. That is the reason history is not written based on recollections. By that time she had given the fiddle to a museum in South Dakota with the proviso it be taken out and played every year in Pa’s memory. At the time she donated the fiddle to the museum it was discovered that it was quite a valuable instrument.
I was so overcome I really could not talk to her. She asked me questions about myself that I answered, but most of the conversation was between Mother and Mrs. Wilder. I remember they talked about how my grandparents were married in 1885, the same year she and Almanzo married and they talked about the big blizzard in Kansas that year and how similar it probably was to the ones in The Long Winter. The piece of the conversation I remember best was about why she stopped writing books at the end of These Happy Golden Years. It had ended on such a happy note and I wanted to know more. She told us about how tough their lives had been after their daughter Rose was bom. Almanzo suffered a medical episode similar to a stroke and it took him several years to recover. They lost their farm during a downturn in the economy. She took in sewing and they saved money from that work to start over in Missouri in the orchard business. Their son died after falling ill with one of those diseases easily treated today, but not on the frontier of South Dakota. The couple had no more children after the son died. In that family of four daughters Rose was the only grandchild and she did not have children, so that branch of the Ingalls family ended. Laura told us she had not continued the series because their life was not the kind of story you write for children. I did not think so much about that conversation when On the Way Home came out because it was a positive story about them getting back on their feet and it was set well after those terrible, hard times. When I heard about the book The First Four Years I wondered how she might feel about that book, going against her own thoughts as it did.
Today we would not have missed an opportunity to have a picture with a favorite author, but we did not think of a picture until we were driving away from her home. We did stop and I took a picture of the house.
I have visited two other locations in the Little House books and I fully intend to get over to Sedan some day to the Little House on the Prairie that Bill Kurtis and his sister have restored. In 1970 our family took an automobile trip to trace the route of the
2
Lewis & Clark Expedition. In a car it was necessary to leave the Missouri River often. During one of those times we made a pilgrimage to De Smet, South Dakota, and saw the surveyor’s house where the Ingalls family lived in the book By the Shores of Silver Lake. When we walked into the house it looked just as it had been described in the book. About the pantry she said, “There before her eyes was a little store. All up the walls of that small room were shelves, and on the shelves were dishes, and pans and pots, and boxes and cans. All around under the shelves stood barrels and boxes.” That described exactly what we saw of that pantry. My daughter and I were enthralled. We expected to see Laura come down the steep stairs from the second floor. While we were at De Smet we drove out to the Ingalls farm. We saw the cottonwood trees they planted after the family moved out to the homestead. Because it was along our route we had also stopped at Brookings where Pa walked to file his homestead papers.
Three years ago, after our granddaughter’s high school graduation in Michigan, my husband and I took a long car trip to Niagara Falls, through upstate New York to the Baseball Hall of Fame, into Vermont and New Hampshire and back to the portion of upstate New York next to the Canadian border. A serendipity of that trip was when I stumbled across an article in the AAA book about the Wilder farm near Burke, New York. Of course, in Farmer Boy the Wilders were said to live near Malone, New York. The farm is closer to Malone than Burke, but Burke has received the AAA mention. It was a bit out of our way, but my interest in all things Little House prevailed and we detoured down there. It was a beautiful farmstead with well-kept buildings. In one of the barns there was a big gift shop. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books are wildly popular in Japan and other places overseas. There were two busloads of people from Japan touring the buildings when we were there and they were frantically buying souvenirs and taking pictures of one other with the house in the background. On another trip that we took into Canada we saw much the same phenomenon at Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, where Anne of Green Gables is set.
I find it quite amazing that the Little House books have remained so popular in this high tech age. I often see them listed as the number one favorite of school children. When I taught at Stevenson School during 1958 and 1959 I read the Little House books to my third graders. Later I read the books to my students in Decatur, Illinois where I taught second grade. Today’s children are still excited to learn about how the pioneers lived, the tools and transportation they had and the relationships in their families. No texting, but they led interesting lives and the children appreciate that. One wonders if they have any concept of being that far removed and out-of-touch. The people we sent into space were far from Planet Earth, but they were always linked by radio with the scientists who sent them there. By comparison, those who took the Oregon or California Trails west or followed the railroad builders to Minnesota and the Dakotas, as the Ingalls family did, were cut loose from home and family. Many never returned or saw their families again.
I have come a long way since being in Stevenson School third grade as a student or a teacher and I still love Laura and Mary. I am encouraging my granddaughter Grace to read her mother’s Little House books just as her two brothers have.
3
Mansfield, Missouri
October 14, 1946
Dear Mary Frances,
I am pleased that you and your mother like my books and that your father and grandmother were interested too.
Your grandmother is six years older than I am. She came to Kansas the year I was married 1885. Our memories must be a great deal the same.
With best regards to your and your family I remain
Yours sincerely
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Original Format
Paper
Title
Remembering Laura Ingalls Wilder
Subject
Hartley, Mary Carttar
Essays
Autobiographical
Description
Reminiscence of Mary Hartley's 1948 visit to Laura Ingalls Wilder at her home in Mansfield, MO.
Creator
Hartley, Mary Carttar
Source
Hartley, Mary Carttar
Publisher
Winfield Public Library, Winfield, Kansas USA
Date
ca 2000
Rights
Relation
Laura Ingalls Wilder Correspondence
Format
application/pdf
Language
English
Type
Narratives
Citation
Hartley, Mary Carttar, “Remembering Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Winfield Digital Collections, accessed December 21, 2024, https://winfield.digitalsckls.info/item/66.Text
REMEMBERING LAURA INGALLS WILDER
by Mary Carttar Hartley
I met Laura and Mary Ingalls when I was a third grader at Stevenson School. My teacher, Almedia Greever, introduced me to the girls in 1944 when she began reading Little House in the Big Woods to our class. A lifelong interest was bom. That year I talked about Laura and Mary so much my mother asked Miss Greever if there were new
girls in my class. When my daughter received the books from her grandparents for Christmas and birthdays, she also developed a passion for the Ingalls girls. Through the years I have collected books by and about Laura Ingalls Wilder, including as many of the ones with the Helen Sewell illustrations as I could find. I had biographies, a cookbook, the Horn Book and a book of letters children had written to her. A magazine, perhaps the
original farm magazine for which she wrote, reprinted all of her columns and I dutifully
collected them. Alas, when we left Colorado and moved to our smaller home in Arizona I gave most of my books and ephemera to the Westminster, Colorado, Friends of the
Library for their annual sale, but I do still have the magazine columns.
Harriet Brooks, my sixth grade teacher, was the person who helped me recognize that real people write books and they are people we can approach. The year before I was in Mrs. Brooks’ class Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, the author of Miss Hickory, came to Winfield at Mrs. Brooks’ invitation. Our fifth grade class was invited to hear her speech. Every year Mrs. Brooks had her sixth graders write letters to their favorite authors. Not only did we use those dry lessons on letter writing that we’d practiced from our English book, we were likely to get a letter back in return for our effort. Of course I wrote to Mrs. Wilder and I received a reply. Oh, Joy! I still have the letter. It was one thing I kept when we moved. I was usually swept away by anything related to reading so I also wrote to Lois Lenski, E. B. White and Carol Ryrie Brink. I received replies from them all.
In 1948 my parents and I drove my older sister, a recent Kansas State College graduate, to New Orleans to board a plane for Bolivia where she was going to teach English at a Methodist mission school in La Paz. The summer had been focused almost entirely on her departure for an unknown world and I was ignored. Mother realized we would be going close to the Wilder home at Mansfield, Missouri, so she prevailed upon the Winfield children’s librarian, Helen Crawford, to help make arrangements for a visit with Mrs. Wilder. Miss Crawford had carried on a friendship with Mrs. Wilder through correspondence. Mother did not tell me about the visit to Mrs. Wilder until after we had started home from New Orleans. I was ecstatic and at the same time intimidated. It was one thing to write a letter, but to meet her in person was quite another.
The day we arrived at Mansfield, we asked in town for directions to the Wilder’s rural home. It was a beautiful two-story farmhouse set on a knoll well back from the road and its name was “Rocky Ridge.” We drove up a long lane to the house and walked up to a small porch at the backdoor. An old man was sitting on the porch whittling. It was
Almanzo, often called Manly by friends. We asked for Mrs. Wilder and he called into the house, “Someone to see you Bessie.” Bessie! Who was Bessie? I thought we had the wrong house. Miss Crawford explained to me when we returned home that Laura was called Bessie by her family, a nickname derived from her middle name of Elizabeth.
We walked into the home through a wonderful big kitchen that was probably the most used room in the house. It smelled of something freshly baked. We were ushered into the front room of the farmhouse, a room that was more parlor than living room and probably not used a great deal. I looked around the room and spotted the china shepherdess that figured so prominently in the Little House books. In the comer there was a small whatnot that resembled the one they made using folded newspapers in Little Town on the Prairie. In my memory of the day I thought she showed us Pa’s fiddle. That is the reason history is not written based on recollections. By that time she had given the fiddle to a museum in South Dakota with the proviso it be taken out and played every year in Pa’s memory. At the time she donated the fiddle to the museum it was discovered that it was quite a valuable instrument.
I was so overcome I really could not talk to her. She asked me questions about myself that I answered, but most of the conversation was between Mother and Mrs. Wilder. I remember they talked about how my grandparents were married in 1885, the same year she and Almanzo married and they talked about the big blizzard in Kansas that year and how similar it probably was to the ones in The Long Winter. The piece of the conversation I remember best was about why she stopped writing books at the end of These Happy Golden Years. It had ended on such a happy note and I wanted to know more. She told us about how tough their lives had been after their daughter Rose was bom. Almanzo suffered a medical episode similar to a stroke and it took him several years to recover. They lost their farm during a downturn in the economy. She took in sewing and they saved money from that work to start over in Missouri in the orchard business. Their son died after falling ill with one of those diseases easily treated today, but not on the frontier of South Dakota. The couple had no more children after the son died. In that family of four daughters Rose was the only grandchild and she did not have children, so that branch of the Ingalls family ended. Laura told us she had not continued the series because their life was not the kind of story you write for children. I did not think so much about that conversation when On the Way Home came out because it was a positive story about them getting back on their feet and it was set well after those terrible, hard times. When I heard about the book The First Four Years I wondered how she might feel about that book, going against her own thoughts as it did.
Today we would not have missed an opportunity to have a picture with a favorite author, but we did not think of a picture until we were driving away from her home. We did stop and I took a picture of the house.
I have visited two other locations in the Little House books and I fully intend to get over to Sedan some day to the Little House on the Prairie that Bill Kurtis and his sister have restored. In 1970 our family took an automobile trip to trace the route of the
2
Lewis & Clark Expedition. In a car it was necessary to leave the Missouri River often. During one of those times we made a pilgrimage to De Smet, South Dakota, and saw the surveyor’s house where the Ingalls family lived in the book By the Shores of Silver Lake. When we walked into the house it looked just as it had been described in the book. About the pantry she said, “There before her eyes was a little store. All up the walls of that small room were shelves, and on the shelves were dishes, and pans and pots, and boxes and cans. All around under the shelves stood barrels and boxes.” That described exactly what we saw of that pantry. My daughter and I were enthralled. We expected to see Laura come down the steep stairs from the second floor. While we were at De Smet we drove out to the Ingalls farm. We saw the cottonwood trees they planted after the family moved out to the homestead. Because it was along our route we had also stopped at Brookings where Pa walked to file his homestead papers.
Three years ago, after our granddaughter’s high school graduation in Michigan, my husband and I took a long car trip to Niagara Falls, through upstate New York to the Baseball Hall of Fame, into Vermont and New Hampshire and back to the portion of upstate New York next to the Canadian border. A serendipity of that trip was when I stumbled across an article in the AAA book about the Wilder farm near Burke, New York. Of course, in Farmer Boy the Wilders were said to live near Malone, New York. The farm is closer to Malone than Burke, but Burke has received the AAA mention. It was a bit out of our way, but my interest in all things Little House prevailed and we detoured down there. It was a beautiful farmstead with well-kept buildings. In one of the barns there was a big gift shop. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books are wildly popular in Japan and other places overseas. There were two busloads of people from Japan touring the buildings when we were there and they were frantically buying souvenirs and taking pictures of one other with the house in the background. On another trip that we took into Canada we saw much the same phenomenon at Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, where Anne of Green Gables is set.
I find it quite amazing that the Little House books have remained so popular in this high tech age. I often see them listed as the number one favorite of school children. When I taught at Stevenson School during 1958 and 1959 I read the Little House books to my third graders. Later I read the books to my students in Decatur, Illinois where I taught second grade. Today’s children are still excited to learn about how the pioneers lived, the tools and transportation they had and the relationships in their families. No texting, but they led interesting lives and the children appreciate that. One wonders if they have any concept of being that far removed and out-of-touch. The people we sent into space were far from Planet Earth, but they were always linked by radio with the scientists who sent them there. By comparison, those who took the Oregon or California Trails west or followed the railroad builders to Minnesota and the Dakotas, as the Ingalls family did, were cut loose from home and family. Many never returned or saw their families again.
I have come a long way since being in Stevenson School third grade as a student or a teacher and I still love Laura and Mary. I am encouraging my granddaughter Grace to read her mother’s Little House books just as her two brothers have.
3
Mansfield, Missouri
October 14, 1946
Dear Mary Frances,
I am pleased that you and your mother like my books and that your father and grandmother were interested too.
Your grandmother is six years older than I am. She came to Kansas the year I was married 1885. Our memories must be a great deal the same.
With best regards to your and your family I remain
Yours sincerely
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Original Format
Paper