Mansfield Missouri

Next it was across the Mississippi and up through Arkansas to the Ozarks Mountains of Missouri.  The reason – Mansfield Missouri is the home of the Laura Ingalls Wilder home where she and Almanzo Wilder moved with their baby daughter Rose and where she wrote all of her famous books.

 

Rocky Ridge Farm

Here is the little farm house that Almanzo built for them one room at a time.  No other family has ever lived in the home and many of their personal belongings are still in the house including much of Laura’s handwork and and furniture and hooked rugs made by Almanzo.  This is where their only living child Rose grew up and there is plenty of information on Rose at the little museum there.  Rose became a wealthy author and journalist.  She was an outspoken critic of the New Deal and was the second oldest war correspondent in Vietnam.  Rose was married briefly and later divorced.  She had no living children and none of Laura’s sisters had children either so there are no living descendants of the “Little House” family.

 

 

Rose later had a stone cottage built on the property and furnished it in the best style even bringing in electricity from the town of Mansfield (several miles away).  She spent $11,000 on this project using a house kit from Sears which cost $700 (a more typical price for a home at that time).  She presented the keys to her parents on Christmas and she herself continued to live in the original farm house.  Several years later Rose moved to Connecticut and her parents promptly moved back into the farm house though they did take much of the furniture Rose bought with them.  Laura said the house looked lonely and they were both homesick for it.  Evidently no one knows how Rose felt about this.

The little museum has some wonderful Little House artifacts such as Pa’s fiddle and Mary’s Nine-patch quilt, family photographs, newspaper articles, items handmade by Laura and Ma etc.  Definitely worth seeing if you are a fan of the books and are passing through southern Missouri.

 

The Stone Cottage

 

Pastoral View from the Stone Cottage

Laura must have been in her early 20s when she moved with her husband from Dakota Territory to Mansfield.  Her sister Carrie visited a few times and she went back to De Smet after Pa died but other than that, she never saw any of her family again.  It makes me a bit sad to think of how this little family endured so much together and were so close, were separated from Laura and she from them for most of her life.  An example of how much we take for granted in this modern age of travel.

There isn’t much else to see or do in the area.  We ate at the only decent place in town, a family owned Mexican restaurant called “Estradas” where we befriended the owner and also another couple having lunch there (all of the above were from CA).  We also went to a local flower nursery/gift shop/chocolate shop that was 15 miles from Mansfield.  The chocolates were nice and we bought a nifty “wrought” iron wall hook thing which we needed for the trailer to hang our cups.

We camped at Missouri Park Campground and what the grounds lacked in charm the very nice owners more than made up for.  We parked next to the another Airstream Overlander (a 1974) which it turned out was owned by a middle school math teacher (Rex from Oklahoma) who was making teaching his second career teaching after working construction and on oil rigs all his life.  Rex was nearing retirement and was teaching too far from home to commute so he renovated the Overlander to live in during the week and went home on weekends.  His renovation, which he did with a buddy , while not original or vintage, was really nice and cozy.  

Evidently teacher salaries and benefits in Missouri are not what they are where we come from.  Nearing retirement, Rex makes $35,000 a year.  Although he does have insurance, it did not cover his hospitalization for his heart attack last year because the ambulance took him to a hospital that doesn’t accept his insurance.  They said it wasn’t an emergency so they didn’t have to cover it.  When he gets that paid off and his youngest child through college (she is dyslexic but a hard worker and has found her niche as a sign language interpreter), then he’ll retire and go back to duck hunting.  He also has a 1957 Airstream Caravel to completely remodel and his house paid off so life is good for Rex unless he has another heart attack.  More about Rex, he was a star pole vaulter and several of his kids were pole vaulters too.

Although we could have stayed longer in the Ozarks and even visited friends in St. Louis, we were itching to really get out west.  The next day we were off to Oklahoma City.

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