fact or fiction?
Lots of chatter today about the recent vandalism of Robert Frost's Vermont farmhouse as reported in The New York Times: a group of teens broke into the home for a night of drink and destruction.

The news made me especially sad, since I've always had a bit of a thing for Robert Frost, who, for many years, was a regular annual winter visitor to my alma mater, Agnes Scott College. Although Frost had died a decade before I began at Agnes Scott, his memory was kept alive by those who had known him, and the Frost room in the library was one of my favorite haunts for four years.

What I am curious about, though, is the comment made by a blogger that she has a friend who worked at one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder homesites, and that they regularly found "panties and beer bottles" (or something of the sort) inside on Monday mornings. While I am no stranger to fantasies of breaking in and spending a night at Rocky Ridge in Almanzo's bed - and I once participated in a bit of a secret seance (I guess it was a secret until now) in which Rose Wilder Lane's ghost in the Little House was contacted - the idea that there might have been "goings-on" at one of the LH sites is something I find hard to believe...

I mentioned Mansfield, but I don't know if the person was talking about one of the replica cabins or the Third Street House; it doesn't matter! The Ingalls or Wilder possessions defaced or destroyed? That's something I find too upsetting to think about for long.

People are people, some people are pigs, and some pigs have no morals. And I hope that what happened in Robert Frost's home is making the powers that be at every one of the LIW museums look at their own security measures to make sure they are protected by the best the market affords.
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:40 AM