Laura Ingalls Wilder and the One-Room Schoolhouse

In the late 1800s, going to school on the American prairie was not easy. Families lived on homesteads, which were tracts of farmland separated by miles of tall grass and dirt trails. One young girl who walked those trails was Laura Ingalls. Born in Wisconsin in 1867, she traveled with her parents and sisters by covered wagon through Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Dakota Territory. Decades later, as Laura Ingalls Wilder, she would become famous for writing historical books about her frontier childhood. Yet before she became an author, she first had to learn to read, spell, and do arithmetic in tiny one-room schoolhouses.

Laura attended her first school near Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in 1874, when she was seven years old. She and her older sister, Mary, walked more than two miles across the open prairie to reach town. In warm weather, they walked barefoot to keep their leather shoes from wearing out, carrying the shoes until they reached the edge of town. At midday, there was no cafeteria. Instead, the sisters ate cold lunches—usually bread and butter—that their mother had packed inside a shiny tin pail.