who moved the church and schoolhouse?
I've been working on Walnut Grove maps a while now. I drew the original town from the original plat. A year or so ago, I went through the deeds from the LH years and copied all the ones that were important: Ingalls, Nelson, Bedal, Church, School, Fitch, Owens, Kennedy, etc. I also copied the deed abstract.

So this afternoon I thought I'd finish a map of the town today, but I wanted to show where all the "LH stuff" would have been, since the LIW Museum (or town?) did place markers at historic sites. The trouble is, the current map distributed by the LIW Museum doesn't have the School and Congregational Church in the location where the deeds say they were.

I discovered this at the time I was studying the deeds, but I got blue in the face trying to convince the good folks in Walnut Grove that the deeds said one thing - they said another. I think the story was that "an old timer said the church was here" - so that's where the sign went.

The deeds say the Congregational Church was in Block 21 (not 22). The deeds say that the school was in Block 20 (not 13). So that's where they are on my map. Btw, the blocks in original Walnut Grove were numbered this way:

08 - 07 - 06 - 05 - 04 - 03 - 02 - 01
09 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16
24 - 23 - 22 - 21 - 20 - 19 - 18 - 17

Block 8 is where the LIW Museum is today, at the corner of County Road 20 and 8th Street. Block 9 is the City Park. The town originally stopped at what is now 8th Street; that was a section line, not part of the town.

Cyberbessie isn't quite sure where to go from here...
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:52 PM