Laura Ingalls’ book and series, Little House on the Prairie, about her life as a pioneer, was an incredibly influential bit of literature for me in an important time in my life. Few books and their subsequent volumes had such a lasting effect on me as this one.
If I try and sum up how Ingalls' books affected me, I’d say the emphasis she gave to how everything (nearly everything) they had was made by hand was the key to my appreciation. Everything they needed was cobbled up from raw materials. Everything they ate (or nearly so; Ma bought flour, sugar, and coffee) was cultivated, dried, and or preserved in some way. Everything they wore was made by hand stitching or knitting. Every tool and bit of furniture was made by hand. I was impressed by their tenacity to survive despite being beset by all kinds of severities like weather, insects, accidents, and disease. The first volume recounts a happy, idyllic existence in the Big Woods or in Town (despite the mean Nellie) and it’s the book on which the tv series dwells. But life gets even darker in subsequent books, something the tv series didn’t really touch. I watched it on the broadcast network in the late 70s and was turned off by the overly-saccharine treatment which felt more like toxic family propaganda (like The Waltons). Blech.
But Ingalls’ books infected me with a desire to learn how the world worked and how to make things. The stories inspired me to develop a sense of materials and how they’d behave when stressed, how to understand and use physics (torque, momentum, pivot points, gravity assist, etc), and to seek to grasp more than just a basic biology of animals and plant toxicology. Later, when I read the FoxFire volumes, a compilation of the practical knowledge of the Appalachian people, I saw the pioneers as ancestors to these people who survived in the remoteness of the mountains and who retain a deep knowing of the world. It's such cool stuff to me— and it’s all information that is still relevant in a world driven by tech.
I also became quite fascinated with how log houses were constructed.
So when we saw the opportunity to purchase an old log house from the 1770s I was smitten with the idea. Holy cow, I was going to live in my dream house. It sits on a small tract of land, 3.5 acres of woods and smaller open areas in northern York county. The parcel of land belonged to one of William Penn’s sons (didn’t all of Pennsylvania belong to them at one time?) and there are about 7 or 8 hidden log houses within a 1-2 mile radius of our house. The land was never scraped so the black humus soil is over a foot deep in places. Walnuts and massive Tulip Poplars grow tall and straight on this north slope; deeper into the woods off the ridge, paw paws grow in large patches radiating from mother trees. We have found morels, turkey-tail, and lions mane mushrooms in our forest here as well as mayapple, jack-in-the-pulpit, trillium, black haw, and many other native species. It’s a very diverse little patch of woods. There’s also a midden off the corner where we’ve found pottery shards from the 1700s, 1800s, and old apothecary bottles from the 1900s.
We’ve been stewards here for 20 years now and have made many improvements to the building such as hardboard siding (to thwart the carpenter bees), shored up the stone foundation (to keep out critters like snakes), and replaced all the windows which used to leak cold air like a sieve. We’ve put on a small addition and added solar panels on the roof to offset my pottery kiln’s electric usage. We have a big vegetable and flower garden and are getting chickens soon. We call it Yankee Modern living. I like to think Laura Ingalls would approve.