PD's Trip to DeSmet, Walnut Grove, and Burr Oak

I don't have too much yet... once I settle back into the daily grind I'm hoping to write up some stuff for you.

Friday I was in DeSmet and did the LIW Historic Homes tour and the LIW Homestead tour. That night I attended "The Long Winter" pageant. I probably won't say much about the first portion of the Historic Homes tour as Dan/VFHusker did an excellent job reviewing it. I don't think he talked about the last visit with the tour, which is the house that Pa built, so I will talk about that. :)

Saturday I drove to Walnut Grove. I went to the LIW Museum that's in Walnut Grove and I also went to the dugout. Again, that night I attended the pageant.

Sunday on the way home I passed through Burr Oak. Unfortunately I was too late for the museum to be open. The Visitor's center was also supposed to be closed, but a man who works there noticed that I drove up and opened the center. There wasn't a whole lot in there. It was a gift shop, but they did also have three 30x40 (about that size) frames that held letters written by Laura.
The visitor's center is in the Burr Oak Bank, which was the first bank to be robbed in the county. It closed two years after the robbery, but it closed due to the Great Depression, not the robbery.
The man was very helpful and enjoyed sharing his LIW knowledge. He pointed out some sights of the town that he thought we would enjoy and he also gave me a Burr Oak, IA info card that has Laura's autograph. I asked him if the autograph were authentic.


So once I get around to finishing working with the photos I'll hopefully get around to posting more of what I did and the neat things I observed.


I will give you a teaser and share a video clip I took. Alison Arngram/Nellie was in Walnut Grove on Saturday and at two she went to the park and did an one hour Q&A session. I was hoping to record the whole thing, but the temperature was in the mid-nineties and Floyd (my camera) kept overheating.
So far I've compressed just one of the files that I took. Hopefully I'll get around to the others soon! :) This is the longest clip.
https://youtu.be/CDwFCes6PMw

MORE! Thanks so much for sharing!! Its so cool to see her just a day ago!

Thanks for sharing..was there a good crowd?

LOVED seeing that! Thanks SO much for sharing!

Glad to hear you were able to visit some in Burr Oak. Thanks for the Nellie video! Very cool

Thanks so much! And you get extra points for having a camera named Floyd.

lol Thanks. I'm not certain how Floyd's name came about. One day he was Floyd... I do think that TAGS may have inspired the name though.


Yes, there was a very large crowd to see Alison! There was probably between two to three hundred people there for the question and answer! The lines for the autographs were ridiculous! I was lucky and arrived right after Alison left for a quick break. I think I had to wait in line for about ten minutes, but I was near the front!
The line at the park for autographs and the line at the pageant were *very* long!

At the pageant after Alison did some more Q&A she came to the audience to sit and she sat down one row in front of me and five chairs to my right! Every time Nellie had a scene she would watch very intently!


Here's the second video. The beginning is pretty shaky as I decided to sit down. After about forty seconds the moving settles down. :)
https://youtu.be/ZmHN6Y-MvUI

The third and final video is still uploading, but this will be the link. :)
https://youtu.be/-bcFAiKP6JE

Sorry it was so hot, but you got some nice video and I'm surprised she is wearing a sweater!

How was the food? Did they have any other guest stars?

Thanks for posting the clips! I'm only part-way through the first one, but enjoying it. I love that your camera is named Floyd! And I'd have been overheating, too. Those mid-nineties are too much for me. Sounds like you had a great time, though! Thank you for sharing it with us!

Yes, I was surprised too that she was wearing long sleeves as she would have known that the temperature was going to be really hot! Granted, it was white, so maybe that helped a bit? Still, I would have roasted!
At the pageant she mentioned that hot weather of the mid-west is worse than hot weather in California as there's relatively no humidity in California.

As I said, I won't go into much detail on the Historic Homes tour as VFHusker did a marvelous job with that. Click here to read his review.


I stayed in Watertown, MN as I was unable to book a hotel closer to DeSmet. The Terry Redlin art museum is in Watertown and there is no admission. If you have the time to swing in, I highly recommend that you do! I stopped in to pick up a gift for my co-worker's husband and ended up staying about half an hour! Terry's paintings are amazing! His style is somewhat similar to Thomas Kinkade's, but I think I like Terry's a bit better.

The drive to DeSmet from Watertown was very beautiful. I hadn't been in South Dakota since I was two so I obviously had no memory of it!
The section I drove through was really cool. For a while the road would be surrounded with crops and suddenly there would be, I presume, a slough. There would be some prairie grasses and then a pool of water. Sometimes there was no growth in the pools and sometimes there would be dead trees and pelicans.


The hour drive went by very quickly- and it was an easy drive too. Just three turns to get to De Smet!
I had to laugh though. At one point there was a sign that said "Rough Road Next Three Miles"... umm... if they seriously thought that road was rough they need to come to Illinois. The road wasn't smooth and was rougher than the rest of the road, but even then it was smoother than the majority of the roads I drive on!

I reached DeSmet, Sd a little after ten. I went straight to the Historic Homes Gift Shop/Tour Starting point.
Truthfully, I was a bit disappointed that one had to pay for the tour in order to go inside the buildings... I'm not a huge fan of guided tours... mainly because that means being with a group of people (which is okay, but they get in the way of photos ;)) and I have to listen to the tour guide... it's not so bad if one doesn't know much about what they're looking at, but I've been reading LHotP things for fifteen-ish years so I can't say that I really learned anything from the tour guide. The tour guide I had was very good. I believe her name was Francis.
It's ten dollars for the tour which gets one inside the Surveyor's House, the original school, and the Ingall's home that Pa built.
Honestly, I think ten dollars is a bit steep... I understand that they do use the money to help pay for upkeep, but still... ten seemed like quite a bit- especially considering how many tours they were having throughout the day. But whatever... I'm a frugal person. I'd definitely go again some day, so yes, it is definitely worth the ten dollars... I just can't picture Laura charging people to look at her things.

The Surveyor's House that was moved into town.

The Brewster School replica. The replica is indeed a claim shanty, though whose is unknown. There were many signs in all of the buildings. Most of the signs had excerpts from the books. I can't say I had time to look at them all...
The last image is the view from behind Laura's desk... thought it was an interesting angle.



As Dan/VFHusker mentioned the school is in the process of being restored. They're tearing off eleven layers of wallpaper!
While tearing off the layers they discovered that there was chalkboard painted right onto the plaster. From what I understand restoration has pretty much stopped until they have the money to continue. They had a donation box for money right in the school... and personally, I'd prefer the tour to be that way, with tour boxes spread throughout, but I understand that having a set fee is probably a better way to do it.

Inside the original school... I can't escape Packer shirts in South Dakota! Interestingly out of the five families in my group four of them were from Illinois!

Okay, I couldn't resist... there really is a face on the chalkboard, but the arrow pointing to the tour guide's reflection was just too good!


In the classroom there was prairie grass and if people wanted they could attempt to make their own hay braid.

After the schoolhouse we drove to the Ingalls's Home, which was built by Pa. Again, no photography was allowed inside. :( That disappointed me a bit. I asked if it meant just flash photography and the tour guide said that it meant all photography. Floyd (my camera) was disappointed.
The house was really neat. It contained a lot of items that were originally owned by the Ingalls. They had some of Mary's beadwork on display, which was particularly fascinating.
In the parlor they had an organ (the original organ is at the Surveyor's house), a violin (that I tuned :b ), a small bed, a stove (not original), a table stand, and a antique glass display case.
There was a bed in, I think, Mary's room as well as a dresser. One could pull out each dresser drawer and look at items that were owned by the Ingalls.
The kitchen was set up to look like how they thought it would have looked when the Ingall's lived there. It was really neat seeing the cupboards that Pa had built.
There was one more bedroom downstairs, I'm presuming Ma and Pa's, that had a bed, Rose's trunk, and a variety of other family owned items.
We were also allowed to go upstairs, but in order to go upstairs we had to go outside and take stairs that had been later added. The inside stairs are original and they prefer people to not use them.
The stairs are quite steep, with a sharp turn at the top.
Each of the upstairs bedrooms were geared toward one person. The first room was Carrie's and had a variety of items that were thought to have been owned by Carrie. They even had the doorknob to Carrie and Nate's house!
They also had Grace's room as well as Rose's room. All of the items in Rose's room belonged to Rose so that room was especially interesting. It was neat seeing how much more modern Rose's room looked compared to the other rooms!



The street signs are really cool! Glad I stumbled across this one. :)


The town's banners that hang on the light posts.


I also visited the Loftus Store. The store has a nice array of Laura's books as well as biographies. They also had some neat souvenir items.


I have a lot of photos that I'm uploading to an album. If you'd like the link and password to the album shoot me a pm and I'll give you the information. :)

Hopefully I'll be able to post more by Friday!

Thank you for showing the picture to us. I felt like, I was there.

That would be a LONG shopping trip for me. I see pencils!!

My niece purchased one of the pencils. They were made out of twigs and were colored pencils.

The violin clock was pretty neat too, though I may think so because I play the violin. :b

Thanks for all the links and videos, and beatiful pics you've posted...They are ...just so special for me! Since I can't afford a trip to the USA's Middlewest, all those pics and links are like treasures for me!

Vanesa.

So cool.Thanks for sharing

Great pics, enjoyed the videos!

When I watched an "extra" section on a LHOP DVD about the Walnut Grove museum, they showed in the store, a beautiful replica of the Little house with figures. Was that just for looking at or did they sell any?

I was in WG and DS at the same time you were there. How cool. I will post pictures next week.

I'm guessing the replica was just for looking at as I only saw one and it was on display in the "Depot" room.


I'm hoping to soon have the time to post more photos and share more memories!

those videos were great. I was in WG when Charlotte Stewart was there but I didn't arrive early enough to hear her speak. I got her siggy tho. I was at Laurapalooza and Alison was there for 3 days or so and we had time to chat with her, it was great. Alison performed her comedy show and was really funny.

Alison was only too happy to be silly with me.


Alison performing her comedy show. It was awesome.

lol Nice!


Quite a few of the workers were talking about the show and how much they had enjoyed it.

cool pics

Sorry I missed this thread before! Wow, looks like you had a fabulous time, despite the heat! Good for you! Thanks for sharing, Prairie Dweller! I can't wait to look through all the videos!

All right... onto the homestead... well... lets see here...


After going to the Loftus Store we made our way to the cemetery. We found the site with very little difficulty. I thought about wandering around the cemetery to see if I could spot any other markers with names that I recognized, but the heat was so intense that I decided not to do so.

We made our way to the Homestead Site, which was simply fabulous. I preferred the homestead to the in-town buildings, mainly for the fact that it was so much easier to picture the Ingalls family living there... I could picture Ma working in her garden, Laura and Mary walking along the ridge viewing the sunset, and Pa working the fields.

On the property the first stop is the main building. One has to pay five dollars in order to enter the property and view all the buildings. The best thing is that one could take as many photos as he wanted. ;)
The main building/tourist trap :b was huge. They had a large assortment of items. One room was pretty much just Laura related books and movies. The other room contained trinkets, but very interesting trinkets!

The first stop on the property was the lookout tower. I really enjoyed going to the top to survey the Ingalls' land as well as the adjacent land. Since the Ingalls owned the land the property changed hands, I believe, five times and in those five sales the 160 acres were never separated, which is simply amazing for farming land.

After the tower was the school house. Outside the school house was a merry-go-round as well as a teeter-totter. With my nieces I participated on playing on the merry-go-round, but I let them enjoy the teeter-totter. I never enjoyed those growing up. It seemed as though I was always the one stuck on top... plus what is the point of a teeter-totter? I prefer the one that was in Landon's series.


Inside the wagon was a conestoga wagon that one could climb into. Along the walls of the rooms was a time-line of the places that Laura had lived. Each section had excerpts from the books.


After the schoolhouse we cut left and visited a dugout that had been cut into the side of the hill. It was quite small and with the heat of the day it smelled very earthy.

After the dugout was a small shanty. There was just enough space for a bed, stove, and table... and that was about it!

Outside of the shanty was a stone tool sharpener. I wanted to know where the shirtless Michael Landon cutout was. ;)


From the shanty we traveled to the sod-roof barn. In the barn was a calf, chickens, and two kittens. I felt *so* sorry for the kittens. It was incredulously hot outside- heat index over 100*- and due to the heat the kittens were so lethargic!



After the barn was a small home. A lady was at the home talking to children as well as giving demonstrations on things that children would have had to do back in the day. (I believe the lady was the same lady that we see on the LHotP dvd extras.) Behind the house a lady had "washing machine" and allowed kids to experience what doing laundry would have been like in the 1800s.


After the house was a barn that housed some horses and ponies. They were offering cart rides for children and then there was also two wagons that would take one to the other schoolhouse on the property.
In the loft of the barn was more hands-on things as well as a miniature stagecoach that one could climb onto.


From the barn we took the wagon ride to the schoolhouse where a lady was waiting to give a fifteen minute "lesson" to the children. Upon entering the children received either a bonnet or a hat.
The lady talked about what school was like in the 1800s and then asked the children what was different about this classroom from their classroom.

I was a bad girl though. I looked out the window and took photos... but... I really thought that maybe I'd see Willie come flying out of the outhouse. ;)


After the lesson was over we took a ride back to the barn and from there we walked to the church that had been moved to the edge of the property. The lane to the church had oats planted on either side. Since it was mid-July the oats were nearly ready to be harvested.


The church itself was interesting... I believe there was one piano and either two or three organs. There was also a functioning bathroom and best of all, the church had air conditioning!
At the front of the church, behind the pulpit, were some offering baskets and shock! There was money in the baskets. I'm not talking one dollar bills. I'm talking ones to twenties. I was shocked that people would leave that much money in a basket that was unattended! I suppose since it was a church and in an offering basket people felt safe, but still!

At the back of the church was a guest log, which I signed, and then flipped through as I was curious where people had come from. There were tons of South Dakotas, Minnesotas, and Nebraskas, but there were also quite a few different Canadian provinces as well as entries from Sweden, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. It was really neat to witness how many people Laura's works have touched.

The view from the church steps...


From the church we made our way to Flindt's Garage. It was another building that was moved to the property. It was originally a mechanic garage that repaired cars as well as farm implements.
Inside was a variety of hands-on activities such as dressing a corn doll as well as making ones own rope.


The Garage was the last place for us to visit. So then we slowly made our way back to the main building, stopping here and there to take photos or observe the scenery.


From there we went back to town and ate at a Dairy Queen and hung out for a while, mainly just to cool off.
After that we went back to the Homestead to watch the play, The Long Winter.
Overall I preferred this play to the play at Walnut Grove... The play at Walnut Grove was better done and had more polish- but it would since they do the same play each year... but The Long Winter stuck to the book, where as the Walnut Grove played "modernized" the story... adding humor... as well as making Caroline quite bold!



Again, I have a lot more photos. If you'd like to see them send me a private message and I'll send you the link and password. :)