Ingalls Homestead - part 2

The Surveyor's House front door

After a night at the only decent looking hotel in town, we headed over to the Surveyor's House. This is the only original surviving house that the Ingalls family lived in, and that was written of in "On the Banks of Plum Creek." We didn't pay the admission price to enter, so just snapped a few photos outside. They don't allow photography in the house, so even if we had gone inside, we would have no pics to show you anyway.

Then we drove over to the only surviving building in town from the books, the Loftus Store.

Inside was a huge disappointment as it is just a trinket store. They did have one area with a lot of Ingalls and Wilder books and stuff, including family albums and dolls.



The Loftus Store

The most interesting to me was that they had a small trunk with four inch pieces of siding from the original building for sale for $8.

The building's owners cut a doorway from their flower shop next door, and found the original tongue and groove siding. So if you are a Little House fanatic, you could probably order a piece of the original Loftus Store building over the phone.

Finally, we headed back to the homestead. The kids had to see the kitties again, and we all wanted to look around some more. The weather was much less windy, and a bit cooler, and very fragrant, as in, well, let's just say the hundred plus cows in the neighboring field didn't smell nice.

We got to go in the store, where they had all sorts of homeseading books, old fashioned games, Charlotte dolls, and every Little House book ever written, by all sorts of different authors. They also had a really fabulous air conditioner, which I stood directly under for a long, long time.

Since we had been there the night before, they let us go ahead out to the homestead without paying the admission. That was very nice of them I think,

Tiny kitten

Outside we followed the kids back to the large barn to find the snaggle toothed kitty. There was a man there showing the other visitors the new kittens. There were five or six kittens, eyes still shut, with their momma, snaggle-tooth, hiding in the hay in the feeding trough. He let the children hold them. Robby wasn't quite sure how to hold such a small, squealing little thing, but he got the hang of it.

After we dragged the kids away from the kittens, we went outside and started to head to a building that we hadn't looked in the night before. The man from the barn said that there was no one over there to show us around, and we were welcome to join the other two families for a wagon ride.

One family was from Michigan, the other from Vancouver, British Columbia. We grown-ups chatted about homeschooling, and how great it is to go on vacations in the fall, just when most other kids are back in school, and the weather is still so nice.

In the wagon, Robby tried to sit in the drivers seat. We told him that the driver would sit there, and he'd have to scoot over. Turns out, the driver told Robby to go ahead and stay there, put the reins in Robby's hands and around the back of him, where the real driver sat. Then Robby drove the wagon with two massive Percheron horses. All seven kids took turns. I think that maybe the horses knew that there was a kid driving, as several times, they took off trotting, all the kids yahoo'd, and the driver pulled them back to a walk. The ride took us to an old one room school house that was moved to the property from a few miles away.



Robby driving the horses



 Back at the main homestead, the whole group went over to that building that we hadn't seen yet. There the same man showed the kids a machine used to snap the dry kernels off of the corn cob, and then they made corn cob dolls. The ground flour in an old coffee grinder, and twisted hay into haysticks just like in "The Long Winter", and made rope with an old braiding contraption.

By this time it was getting late, and we had a long drive ahead of us, so we said goodbye to the other famlies, and set off.

Hannah named her corn cob doll Sally



Making rope



The cottonwood trees on the corner are the one's Pa planted