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Rocky Ridge Farm
The Birthplace of the Little House Books
By Sue Marquette Poremba
My husband and I found ourselves driving through Missouri on our way to visit friends. We miscalculated our trip and ended up with an extra day. We pulled out the atlas to figure out what we could do with that "play" day, but really, there wasn't much to consider. I found the town of Mansfield, Mo., on the map and pointed to it. "This is where I'd like to go," I said. "To Laura Ingalls Wilder's home."
Our atlas did not show any historical marker for Mansfield, and the visitor's center we stopped at just inside the border did not have any information on the Wilder home. But any die-hard Little House fan knows that the books were written at Rocky Ridge Farm, in this Ozark Mountains community, 45 miles east of Springfield, Mo.
Mansfield is the destination in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book On the Way Home (Harper-Trophy, 1976), a diary of the trip from DeSmet, S.D., to the Ozarks. Laura fell in love with the property just outside of town, and this is where she and her husband Almanzo built their farm. As the years wore on, they cleared the land and slowly built on to the one-room shanty that was their living quarters. The end result was a large, white farmhouse that overlooked the rolling hills.