There’s been a lot of behind-the-scenes planning and excitement here at Beyond Little House over the past few weeks, as we work on the scope and schedule for the big summer 2010 conference.
The Department of Mass Communications at Minnesota State University, Mankato, agreed to sponsor the event, and that means participants will get to enjoy the campus and green spaces of Mankato, Minn. (Yes, as my colleague Sandra Hume has pointed out, that Mankato.)
Mankato is located 80 miles southwest of the Twin Cities, which is the closest major airport hub. The city itself is a kind of crossroads in Minnesota history as well as Minnesota geography. Highway 14, which used to bisect (but now slightly bypasses) Mankato, runs from east to west, hooking up with the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River very near Pepin, Wis. It has been named the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway” because many of the Upper Midwest Laura sites connect to it.
Pepin is about a two-hour drive east of Mankato; Walnut Grove is about a one-and-a-half hour drive west of Mankato. Mankato itself serves as south central Minnesota’s shopping and commerce hub, and offers a wide variety of restaurants and friendly shopping. For quilters, scrappers and yarn-o-phobes (like me!), Mankato offers several local, small shops, including Mary Lue’s Yarn and Ewe and River City Quilts, that take advantage of locally produced wool from the Fairbault Woolen Mills, about 45 minutes from Mankato.
The city claims another connection to Little House history, however. The conflicts with the Dakota Sioux in Minnesota, which are referred to in LHOP as the “Minnesota massacres,” took place just west of Mankato, near New Ulm, Minn. An estimated 400 to 800 settlers were killed. More than a thousand American Indian people were taken into custody at the end of the troubles, and all were slated to be hanged. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln, inclined to mercy, had to be persuaded that at least some of those in custody should be executed as an example to other tribes. Thirty-eight native people met their deaths by hanging–in the town square in the Blue Earth County seat, Mankato.
Today, the site of what is still the country’s largest mass execution in history is marked by a large sculpted buffalo and 38 pines, planted in honor of those lives lost. The small area has been named “Reconciliation Park.”
North of Mankato in St. Peter, Minn., the North American Treaty Site Museum offers visitors a look at the very spot where treaties between the United States and the Dakota were negotiated and signed. It’s well worth the visit.
Mankato also claims another famous literary resident: Maud Hart Lovelace, the author of the Betsy-Tacy series of books for children. She and her best friend, Francis “Bick” Kenney, grew up across the street from each other on Center Street in Mankato, in homes that have now been lovingly restored and kept by the Betsy-Tacy Society.
I’m personally excited to be hosting you all here. As plans move forward, I’ll update you. But please let us know if there are activities or speakers you’d like to see us include on the LauraPalooza 2010 schedule! Use the comments section below.
As a book collector and antiquarian bookseller, I’d love to hear someone speak on the topic of the bibliography of the works of both Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. I’d also like to know more about Laura’s relationship with her publishers. Thanks! I am going to try to get from CA to MN in 2010 to attend this conference.
As an avid quilter, I would love to have a discussion of the domestic arts, particularly needlework. The accomplishments of both Laura and Rose in this area would make it, I believe, an interesting topic.