Archives for As a Laura Ingalls Wilder Researcher Thinks

U is for udder

Published on April 24, 2012

Almanzo had finished milking, he filled the pans for the cats. His father went into Blossom’s stall with his own pail and stool, and sat down to strip the last, richest drops of milk from Blossom’s udder. But Almanzo had got it all. Then Father went into Bossy’s stall. He came out at once, and said: “You’re a good milker, son.”

Almanzo just turned around and kicked at the straw on the floor. He was too pleased to say anything. Now he could milk cows by himself; Father needn’t strip them after him. Pretty soon he would be milking the hardest milkers. — Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy, Chapter 2, Winter Evenings

All those cows in "Little House," and udder is mentioned once


Udder – The gland of a female mammal in which the milk is secreted and stored for the nourishment of the young;- commonly called the bag in cows and other quadrupeds. (Webster, 1882)

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T is for tinkham

Published on April 23, 2012

Harold (son), Charles Tinkham (furniture man), & Adeline (wife)

Charles H. Tinkham was one of the first businessmen on the ground in De Smet in the spring of 1880. Born in Somerset County, Maine, May 28, 1854, Charlie was educated in the local schools and began teaching at the age of 17. He taught winter terms while working in a shoe factory. In 1876, he went west to Minnesota and filed on a claim in Rock County, working as clerk for Angell & Loomis, dealers in furniture and harness in Luverne, Minnesota. In the fall of 1879, he returned to Masachusetts, where he married Adeline Jennings on October 21st.

In the spring of 1880, Charles Tinkham was 26 years old. Leaving his wife back home, he came to De Smet in advance of the railroad, walking from Volga to De Smet beside his wagon full of lumber with which to build a furniture store, and a few chairs to sell in it. He was a member of the “bachelor’s club” formed that year: Charlie Tinkham, Will Whithing, Jake Hopp, Walter Kermott, Gerald Fuller, Chet Lamson (Almanzo Wilder’s cousin) and a few other young men held fort during the Hard Winter in the Couse building,, sleeping on boards across the ceilling joists, grinding their own flour, and doing their own cooking. Lawyer Barnes remembered “friend Tinkham as the chief cook and bottle washer for the Bachelor Inn.” Tinkham recalled a half century later that there was little business conducted that first year, as stores had little merchandise and the new settlers had even less money to spend.

Mrs. Tinkham came to De Smet after the Hard Winter, and their only child – Harold – was born there in 1882. Tinkham’s Furniture Store was located just south of Thomas Power’s tailor shop, and the Tinkhams lived in rooms over the store for twelve years. It was here that Laura Ingalls and Mary Power attended the Ladies’ Aid Society dime sociable described in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town on the Prairie (see Chapter 17, “The Sociable”).

Tinkham Furniture Store advertisement

By the 1930s, Charles Tinkham had been in been in business longer than anyone else on De Smet’s main street, and he was an authority on the town’s early history. Having lost his hair at a young age, Charles Tinkham always advertised himself as the “bald-headed furniture man,” often including a photograph of himself in his newspaper ads. He was the town’s first furniture dealer, first undertaker, and first secretary of the De Smet Cemetery board. He also served as town clerk and Kingsbury County Treasurer. In 1883, he also added newspaperman to his job description, when joining Jacob Hopp in the running of a local paper. When Jake wanted to leave the newspaper business, he, in turn, went into business with Charles Tinkham at the furniture store. Tinkham was an avid participant in town literaries and one of the forces behind the county’s “old settlers” celebrations, which still take place each June. He supported the local school in whatever way he could; the class of 1918 gave him a gold ring to show their appreciation for his help with practice for their class play.

In her diary kept during a trip back to De Smet in 1931, Laura and Grace visited Mrs. Tinkham and wrote that she was “a little bit of an old woman but seemed very natural. Called me Laura and kissed me and seemed very glad to see me.” Shortly after this visit, the Tinkhams moved to the Odd Fellows Home, where Charles Tinkham died July 3, 1938. He was buried in the De Smet cemetery.

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S is for sweet memories

Published on April 21, 2012

Laura's Sweet Memories, Mansfield, Missouri

One of my favorite things about taking a “Little House” trip is the shopping – not only in the museum giftshops and bookstores, of course – but in the various little stores and shops you’ll find in “Little House” towns from Malone to Mansfield (and everywhere in between). You’ll meet wonderful people who know interesting facts about their Laura town and are always willing to talk to you. And I bet you’ll also find some fun items to buy that you don’t see every day at home.

Not only does the Loftus Store in De Smet (yes, that Loftus! Still in its original location!) have an amazing Little Town on the Prairie section and scrapbooks about the store, they also have beautiful home decor, candles, fun jewelry and clothing. Fond Memories (the in the old creamery building) in Walnut Grove has educational toys, the best scrapbooking and rubber stamping items I’ve seen anywhere, and antiques. Oh, the antiques (I found both a Rogers Crown teaspoon and a piece of willoware in Laura’s pattern last time I was there). I bought my favorite garden sculpture and learned about some native Wisconsin plants at Smith Brothers Landing in Pepin. And I hear through the grapevine that the old Merchantile building in Burr Oak will have a new life…. soon.

Almanzo's sheep & Laura's chicken

I was lucky enough last summer to catch Rev. Jim, owner of Laura’s Sweet Memories in Mansfield as I drove through town just before his closing time. We had a lovely visit and I could have spent hours looking at all the photographs and town memorabilia on his walls. You know you’re going to visit the Mansfield Library while there; his candy shoppe is right across the street. Check out Rev. Jim’s website for more information. And don’t forget to stop by his blog for some great recipes and to keep up with local news.

Here’s two of my purchases from Laura’s Sweet Memories: a locally made “Almanzo’s merino sheep” ornament and a “Laura’s chicken” magnet, chatting nose-to-nose on the magnet board beside my computer. Again, yummy candy, hand-made greeting cards, fun souvenirs, and CHOCOLATE! What’s stopping you?

Filed in MEMORIES,PLACES | 5 replies

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R is for rag rug

Published on April 20, 2012

Crocheted Rag Rug

Rag rugs are mentioned several times “Little House” books. The rag rugs are something Laura notices in These Happy Golden Years; home after teaching in the Brewster School, the rag rugs were “gay on the floor.” Just this simple statememt gives the reader a visual picture with which to compare the cozy and happy Ingalls house to the stark and bleak one of the Brewsters. If you want to decorate a space and have it look like it just stepped out of the pages of a “Little House” book, you can’t go wrong with a rag rug.

Laura and Ma place rag rugs before the doors in The Long Winter (they’re pretty and keep cold air from blowing in beneath the door), and blind Mary Ingalls is able to braid carpet rags by keeping the colored strands in separate boxes and remembering which is which. When Laura mentions rag rugs in the Ingallses’ house, they are typically either decribed as braided or she doesn’t go into detail about their construction. We know that Laura herself braided rugs in real life. In daughter Rose Wilder Lane’s Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework (New York: Simon and Schuester, 1963), the last chapter is devoted to rug-making, and the last pattern in the book is for a “five strand” braided rug, accompanied by a photograph of a five-strand braided rug made by Laura Ingalls Wilder (the actual rug is usually on display at the Laura Ingalls Wilder / Rose Wilder Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri).

Only one time is a crocheted rag rug mentioned in the LH books. In These Happy Golden Years, while Laura and Almanzo are waiting to be married in Reverend Brown’s parlor, Laura notices three things: a picture on the wall, a marble topped table, and the crocheted rag rug on the floor below. In her Needlework book, Rose states that crocheted rag rugs date from around the mid-nineteenth century at the earliest. Usually round, they were crocheted in single stitch (usually called “single crochet”), of rags, using a wooden crochet hook of giant size. “Every crocheter knows the routine,” said Rose.

I crocheted the rug in the picture about twenty years ago. It’s rectangular – much easier to make than a round or oval rug, which every crocheter knows involves adding just the right number of stitches in just the right spots in order to keep the rug from puckering. This rug is about 4 feet wide and has varied in length over the years. Depending on where I wanted to use it, I’ve pulled out rows or crocheted them back over the years. Although faded a bit, it’s still remarkably sturdy.

If you want to crochet a rug and don’t have a stash of fabric or lots of old LH site t-shirts to cut or tear into strips (t-shirt material makes great rugs!), let me tell you that it’s not a cheap project. Each colored “stripe” in my rug is at least a yard of fabric, cut into 2-1/4 inch strips and sewn together. You don’t have to sew strips together; there are several tricks for cutting one long strip out of a rectangle of fabric, or joining them without sewing.

One thing you don’t realize until you crochet a rag rug is just how heavy they can be. And because they’re heavy and bulky, they aren’t the easist things to wash and dry. Best these days to keep to a size your washing machine can handle.

An easy first rag crochet project is a coaster, as pictured in the insert. Shown on the coaster is the crochet hook I use for fabric; I made it out of apple wood. By the way, that’s my “Pa’s cottonwood” in the background of the photo.

Filed in CRAFTS,LIW A-Z | 4 replies

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Q is for quarter section

Published on April 19, 2012

Me. With Deed. Why?

This is my idea of a vacation photo. Me, holding a deed or homestead file of some “Little House” character or Laura Ingalls Wilder relative aimed at the camera while standing in front of the land the deed or homestead file pertains to. Usually, I’ve been in a car way too long, the wind is blowing, and I’ve dragged someone along to take the picture, someone who really isn’t all that keen on seeing where George Wilmarth homesteaded or where Margaret Garland had a tree claim.

You might be interested in the photo shown here, though; it’s the quarter section on which Almanzo Wilder grew that seed wheat he hoarded behind a wall in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter. The quarter section is in Marshall, Minnesota; I blogged about it a few days ago. Not that it matters, but the original patent owner – the person who first proved up on this quarter section as a homestead – was someone named John Pears.

Public lands acquired by the federal government from states, a foreign country, or by the cession of Indian lands by treaty or purchase were legally designated according to the “Section, Township, Range” system. They were laid out in a large grid broken down by Section, Township, and Range and identified by their distance from a particular Baseline and Meridian. Thirty states, including all of those in which Laura Ingalls lived, used this system of identification.

4 Quarter Sections = 1 Section

Others typically used a system of “metes and bounds,” which referred to descrip-tions of local vegetation and obvious physical features of the land (mountains, bodies of water, trees, rocks, proximity of neighbors) for location of property boundaries.

The federal township and range system recorded surveyed public lands by grids or “squares,” which were broken down into successively smaller squares for ease in identification. The basic unit of measure is the Section – a square tract of land measuring one mile by one mile and containing 640 acres. Each section contains four quarter sections of 160 acres. A quarter section, therefore, is one-fourth of a square mile; it was the common size of homestead, preemption, and tree claims, and was typically the largest amount of land an individual could file on per type of claim under the United States Public Land Laws.

If you don’t yet have a copy of the booklet I co-authored with Penny Linsenmayer – Charles Ingalls and the U.S. Public Land Laws, pick one up at the gift shop at the LIW Museum in Walnut Grove or at the Ingalls Homestead in De Smet. The booklet explains Pa’s land dealings in detail, including the story of his preemption claim (the dugout site which is called the Ingalls Homestead but wasn’t a homestead), tree claim and actual homestead in Redwood County, Minnesota.

As a bonus today, I’m uploading THIS MAP I did, which is also in the land booklet. It’s formatted for legal-sized paper. Although it may not be uploaded on other sites or used elsewhere on the internet or in publications without permission (my email address is in the sidebar), you may print a copy for your own non-commercial and private use so you can drive by and snap your own claim photos next time you’re in Kingsbury County.

I’d love to see any photos of claims identified on this map that you’d like to share with me, as long as you also tell me whose claim they’re of and from which side they were taken!

Filed in HOMESTEADING,LIW A-Z | 2 replies

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