Sarah Uthoff has been in Pepin this past weekend for this year’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Days. In the event’s living history area is cabinetmaker David Johnson, who has built replicas of Laura’s lap desk. Readers of the Rose-penned introduction to On the Way Home, Laura’s diary of the weeks-long wagon ride from South Dakota to Missouri in 1894, remember the lap desk as the unlikely spot in which the family’s $100 bill was lost. (It was eventually found.)
Watch Johnson talk about the lapdesk in Sarah’s video.
Incidentally, a replica just like this one was offered for sale at LauraPalooza 2010. It sold immediately.