“Site of the Ingalls”

This is the homestead site of CHARLES AND CAROLINE INGALLS and their daughters Mary, Laura, Carrie and Grace.

In four of her Little House series of stories of pioneering by the Ingalls and Wilder families, Laura Ingalls Wilder, beloved writer for children, has told of the Fall and Winter the family spent at a railway construction camp by the ‘Shores of Silver Lake’ (1879-80) then moved to the

townsite of De Smet ‘Little Town on the Prairie” a mile west to live in the Ingalls Store Building briefly, then move to a claim shanty on this site, across the Big Slough from town. Here Pa planted the cottonwoods that still stand and Ma made a home for her family. After the October Blizzard they returned to the town to spend ‘The Long Winter’ (1880-81). One of the schools Laura was to teach was a mile south of this site in ‘These Happy Golden Years’ she told of her romance and marriage to Almanzo Wilder and their life in a claim shanty two miles north of De Smet, where their daughter Rose Wilder Lane, journalist and author, was born. Mrs. Wilder died Feb. 11 1957, aged 90, at the farm in the Ozarks near Mansfield, Mo., where they had lived since 1894.

Kingsbury County, near intersection of Homestead Road and 208th street (2006)