Ingalls Homestead and the De Smet Historic Homes

Charles Ingalls came to Dakota Territory in 1879 to keep store and books for the Chicago and North Western Railroad, which was building west, and the family spent that first winter in the surveyors' house beside Silver Lake. On February 19, 1880, he filed at the land office in Brookings on a quarter section about a mile from the new town of De Smet, built a shanty, and moved the family out that spring. In the bad winters they moved into town above his store, among them the winter of 1880 and 1881 that Laura would write about as The Long Winter, when the trains stopped and families burned twisted hay to stay warm.

The homestead papers survive in the National Archives. In 1886 Charles swore that he had lived on and improved the land, listed the house, the barn and the crops, and received title to some 157 acres for about sixteen dollars in fees. The five cottonwoods he planted still stand on the original acre, which is now a memorial site, and the farm around it is run as the Ingalls Homestead, with wagon rides and a one-room school.

In town, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society keeps the surveyors' house, moved from the lake shore; the first school of De Smet, where Laura and Carrie studied, its original blackboard found under layers of wallpaper; and the house Charles built on Third Street in 1887, where he and Caroline lived out their lives. The two sites are run separately. Charles, Caroline, Mary, Carrie and Grace are buried in the De Smet cemetery.