Charles and Caroline Ingalls Homestead

The bronze tells the family's years here through the titles of the novels, and its last line is a day off: Laura Ingalls Wilder died at Mansfield on February 10, 1957, three days after her ninetieth birthday. The plainer account she wrote first, at sixty-three, was the memoir Pioneer Girl, which her daughter Rose Wilder Lane offered to publishers who turned it down. It waited more than eighty years, until the South Dakota Historical Society Press issued an annotated edition in November 2014; the first printing of 15,000 copies sold out in three weeks.

What the plaque says

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, be- loved 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 the town. Here Pa planted the cotton- woods 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. Dedicated June 10, 1958 This plot donated by Edward E. May, owner.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ingalls Homestead and the De Smet Historic Homes — steps away
  The quarter section a mile from De Smet that Charles Ingalls filed on in 1880 and proved up in 1886, the house in town he built, and the cottonwoods he planted.

More markers nearby

• Site of the Ingalls Homestead 1880 — 0.3 mi
• De Smet Forest / De Smet — 0.5 mi
• St. Petri Lutheran Church — 1.3 mi
• Father Pierre Jean De Smet — 1.5 mi