📍Rocky Ridge Farm, 3060 Highway A, Mansfield, MO 65704, USA
1894 – 1957“I grew up in covered wagons and little houses across the frontier, from the Big Woods of Wisconsin to the prairies of Kansas, Minnesota and Dakota Territory, with Pa's fiddle, Ma's quiet strength and my sisters around me. I married Almanzo Wilder in De Smet, and after years of crop failures, illness and a fire, we set out in 1894 with our daughter, Rose, in a covered wagon for the Ozark hills of Missouri, carrying a hundred-dollar bill saved for a new start. On 30 August 1894 we arrived in Mansfield and bought forty acres of stony, wooded land with a one-room log cabin by a spring. We called it Rocky Ridge Farm. It was hard going: we cleared the land, sold firewood and planted a thousand apple trees, and over the years we built our farmhouse room by room, finishing it in 1913, with wood from our own land and a big stone fireplace. We raised hens and dairy cows, and I wrote for the Missouri Ruralist for many years, about farm life and the rights of farm women. It was here, in my sixties, at my desk in the farmhouse, that I began writing down the stories of my childhood in pencil on cheap school tablets. Rose, now a writer herself, helped me edit them, and Little House in the Big Woods appeared in 1932, followed by the rest of the series. Almanzo and I lived at Rocky Ridge for more than sixty years, and the farmhouse, with Pa's fiddle and my writing desk, is now the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum, welcoming the children who still read about our pioneer days.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today