Independence, Kansas-a wide spot in the road of Southern Kansas which has a surprising number of sort of interesting things nearby. Their tiny little zoo has the descendants of the First Monkeys in Space. They have a pretty nifty little Halloween festival they call Neewllaw-Halloween spelled backwards. And they have one of the seemingly endless spots where Laura Ingalls had a cabin on the prairie.
The Little House on the Prairie site is a pretty modest affair, four buildings and a wagon. One of the buildings is a gift shop with magnets and books and copies of the TV show for sale. The Little House on the Prairie cabin is a replica of the Ingalls cabin. It is small verging on tiny. Even if you take into consideration that people were a lot smaller back then, this is a small house. The replica only has one bed and a couple of crude chairs, so you are left wondering where the children slept if the sole bed was used by the parents. There is no loft as seen in the TV show starring Little Jo Cartwright.
The other two buildings are an old Post Office and an Old School House. The Post Office doesn’t seem to have even a vague connection to the Ingalls, the museum just had the chance to put it there and they did. The School House looks much as the one in Little House on The Prairie the TV Show looked. Rows of old fashioned desks and a blackboard in front. These four buildings are, not surprisingly, in the middle of an open field that could be called a prairie I suppose.
Which is one of the reasons The Little House on the Prairie site is not a major tourist draw. Unless you happen to be in Independence, as I was on business, it is not really worth a trip for its own sake. There where a lot of books by Laura Ingalls, only one of which had a catchy title worthy of naming a TV Show after.
One of the more interesting things on the site is a billboard with a map of all the places the Ingalls lived. There are a lot of places marked on the map. They lived, for brief periods, in most of the frontier states where a man could try his hand at farming and fail at it. Once Laura married and left her parents care, her new husband made her father look like a stick in the mud as they proceeded to moved at least a dozen times on their own.
The Little House on the Prairie that you see on TV did not take place in Kansas, or at least, most of it did not take place in Kansas. Still, what do you want for three dollars? There are plans, so we were told, to rebuild to insect eaten Little House and build a new replica. They are also going to have one of those Portrait Studios were you dress up in an Old West Outfit and have a tinted photographer made. There was talk of turning part of the property in a campground of some sort, but that seemed to be very much in the planning stages.
If you like Little House on the Prairie it is worth a stop to take a few pictures. But maybe it would be easier to just read one or two of Laura Ingalls books.
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