Pioneer house

Growing up I loved the Little House books! You know, Laura and Mary, Pa and Ma, Jack and …Pa’s fiddle. My son loved them too (yes boys can enjoy Little House books too). He used to listen to the audio versions at bedtime. Once he got stuck listening to the chapter on losing Jack when they crossed the river. He listened to it night after night and I wanted to tell him that everything would be okay if he’d just move on to the next chapter. But this isn’t a post about those books, even though…

There has been a theme running in our family lately. While I have been working for years to establish order, routine, and organization in our lives, I have continually failed. I just couldn’t seem to make it work. But lately, we (my husband and I) have been analyzing why that is. The fact that we […]

She’s known for writing the Little House on the Prairie children’s books series released from 1932 to 1943.

The Homes of Laura Ingalls Wilder provides old and new images of all the homes that the "Little House" author lived in as a child and adult.

Exterior, elevation.

Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder, floorplan of cabin. Original tiny house, little cabins with lofts.

As the long winter finally thaws, and the pioneer-esque dresses we saw on the runways finally hit stores, what will you be wearing as you strike out into the wilderness this spring?

Once westering pioneers reached their destination, they had to build homes. Those homes reflected the available natural resources of the land. In forested areas, log homes were popular. Some areas in rocky terrain used stones. Some in the Southwest, where clay was plentiful, used adobe. On the Great Plains, sod houses, called “soddies,” were the most common abodes. (There were some wealthier settlers who brought pre-cut timber cabin kits with them offered through the Sears & Roebuck catalog…

The Little House was a loft located in Plum Creek where the Ingalls family lived, and later, the Carter family. The Ingalls family moved to Plum Creek after being ordered to leave Kansas by the government, because they were on the wrong territory. In total, they moved three times and finally settled in Iowa, which is when the Carters came. Before that though, the Ingallses left Walnut Grove for gold country with the Edwards family, and later to Winoka which is where Mary and her future…