Prairie Adventure: and other DeSmet offerings

There’s more. More DeSmet.

I’ll try to keep this one simple.

Just out of town is the tree claim Almanzo and Laura tried in vain to homestead.

There’s just this simple marker to represent years of hope and heartache and hardship. Two babies born here. One baby died here. The highs and lows of love and loss on this speck of prairie that cost the Wilder family so much.

And there are trees here that Almanzo planted. Trees here that he stood beside and hovered over and hoped against hope they’d survive.

The prairie has taken so much of that back. And the land is living on. Being farmed by another.

In the opposite direction of the Wilder homestead claim stands a large grove of trees beside a small body of water.

Under those prairie trees rest the bodies of Charles and Caroline, Carrie and Mary and the newborn baby boy born to Laura and Almanzo.

It’s a peaceful resting place with a prairie wind endlessly blowing. Just over the ridge, easily visible from Pa’s tombstone, is his own prairie homestead.

It seems right somehow.

In the town of DeSmet there’s a single building on Main Street that has stood the rigorous test of time, has survived the brutal Dakota winters, to still be standing in its original place and original form.

The Loftus Store was a first Main Street store in Laura’s Little Town on the Prairie. It was diagonally across the street from the storefront building Pa built on Main Street that the family lived in during The Long Winter. Just beside the Loftus Store Pa tied a rope from his storefront to cross the street during the blizzard.

The owners of the Loftus Store recently knocked down a piece of an internal wall in the store to make a passageway between two buildings and they saved all the original boards in the 130 year old store. The boards that Pa probably helped to piece together and form the store.

These boards were cut into small squares and were being sold in the store.

Yes. Kevin purchased a Loftus Store board for us. My plan is to write a Laura Ingalls quote on the old piece of history and hang it on our wall.