If you go: The museum is open seasonally, from May 15 to Oct.In town, almost 12,000 visitors a year stream through the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, which is packed with artifacts and photographs from Pepin's pioneer days.Įvery September, the town plays host to Laura Ingalls Wilder Days, complete with a fiddle contest, square dancing, a pancake breakfast, a parade - and a 5k run I don't remember from the books. But a replica log cabin, dubbed The Little House Wayside, stands on the land once owned by Charles and Caroline Ingalls. Visitors to Pepin now will find that modern farms have tamed the wilderness: The big woods are gone, as is the original little house. (For those reading along, these are the "The Little House in the Big Woods" years.) 7, 1867, seven miles north of the village of Pepin.
(Read "The Long Winter" for a hint about why.) What's better for a long road trip than an audio book? Consider listening to Wilder's stories while you drive.Īnd take note: many of the sites are only open in the summer months. The complete Laura Ingalls Wilder road trip
Where time has torn things down, replicas have been built - and there are enough bonnets and big woods to go around. She and her husband Almanzo ultimately landed on Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Mo., where she put pen to paper and introduced the world to the Ingalls family.įor readers with their own itchy wandering feet, many of the places Wilder immortalized are open to visitors - you can put your feet in Plum Creek or look up at the very cottonwoods that Pa planted. Only some of their starts and stops made it into the books.īy the time the family finally settled in De Smet, Wilder herself still had miles to go. They doubled back, moved again, and kept heading west. In all, the family trekked more than 2,000 miles, most of it by horse-drawn covered wagon, reaching as far south as Independence, Kan., just shy of the Oklahoma border.
to De Smet, S.D.: 300 miles and change.īut the highway markers only tell a piece of the story. On a map, it seems like a simple journey - almost a straight shot from Pepin, Wis. Route 14 as the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway, to mark the family's path. In 1995, Minnesota and surrounding states designated U.S.
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