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During our last long road trip in 2013, we made a point of visiting a couple Little House on the Prairie sites. We visited De Smet, South Dakota and Mansfield, Missouri (where the books were written). There’s quite a few more sites to visit and we added some of them to this year’s road trip.
The first Little House site we visited on this road trip was the old homestead Pa built in Indian Territory. Nowadays it’s outside of Independence, Kansas and the original log cabin is long gone. There’s an old log cabin on the site, but it’s not the original.
It does give you a good idea of the size and construction details though, so we thought it was interesting.
While the original log cabin is long gone, the original hand-dug well is there, and was used to help determine the homestead site. It’s cemented over for safety.
There’s an old frame house that serves as the visitor center/gift shop, some barns, the log cabin, and an old school that was originally located about 4 and a half miles away and a post office from the town of Wayside, both of which were moved to this location to preserve them from being torn down.
We visited on a Saturday that was also the date of the local Prairie Days Festival. They had petting zoo animals, music performances, a blacksmith, a rope making demonstration, several other period-type demos, and local 4-H groups selling refreshments.
On non-festival days I don’t think there’s quite as much to see and do, so visiting on a festival day easily doubled the amount of time we’d have spent there. The demos were interesting and the kids had fun with the animals.
