Isn’t it great when you when you’re minding your own business out in the woods and you discover a Honey Tree? Well, I found one this last weekend. I was working on promoting my Seeking Laura Letters project. I’m trying to find as many as possible of the letters that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote in answer to her fan mail. So far I’ve located and saved copies of 24 (including a couple given to me last year at Laurapalooza) and safely deposited copies with the archive at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Some of the letters repeat the same thing over again in sort of a standard letter, others had something unique an answer to what happened to Charlotte, why Laura and Almanzo are looking down in that famous photo of them with the dog in front of the Rock House, written proof that Laura returned to Pepin to visit while living in Spring Valley, a musical description of the prairie, etc. This is a personal project so I’m always looking for new ways to pass the word around and unfortunately most of the cheap ways of doing that are online and the people I need most to reach mostly aren’t. If you have any suggestions or know of anyone with a letter please let me know.
The honey tree I mentioned above involved a related part of the project. I’m also trying to track down early photos of any of the homesites. I started visiting on a regular basis in about the mid-1980s so I have a fairly decent photographic record of changes from then on, but I’m always looking for accounts, photos, or even home movies of the homesites from before that. In response to a posting on Facebook Wendy Corsi Staub (one of the speakers at Laurapalooza) volunteered she had some footage and posted a recently digitalized home movie of her family’s trip to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1975. What treasures could you share?
LIW Homesite Footage Circa 1975
Learn more about the project, including a flyer about it you can print out and post.
Seeking Laura Letters
See Wendy in this Laurapalooza Video.
Laurapalooza Day 5 Part 1
Sarah S. Uthoff blogs at TrundleBed Tales; look for her on Twitter and YouTube and Blog Talk Radio