Laura Ingalls Wilder Days- Pepin, Wisconsin

We've been reading the Little House on the Prairie books for the last few months. One of the things I was most excited about when we found out we were moving to Minnesota was being close enough to visit some of the sites from the books. We've visited three of the sites this summer. Although Pepin, Wisconsin was the third site we visited, I'm going to start with it since it's the one from her first book.

This weekend was Laura Days so we decided to plan our visit to go to that too. Pepin is the setting for Little House in the Big Woods. Laura was born 7 miles north of Pepin. They have a log cabin that may have looked like hers built on land that was owned by Charles and Caroline Ingalls. The big woods are gone and have been mostly replaced with farmland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a museum there with items that would have been from the time Laura lived. It was just a quick walk through for us. The other museums we've visited have a lot more Laura memorabilia. They are renovating this museum and it looks like the size will increase a lot so hopefully it will have more to it after that. The museum has a gift shop with some cute things.

 

You can also see the lake that Laura talks about in the book on her visit to town.

 

The Laura Days festival was in the park. There were traditional craft demonstrations, a quilt show, and art and craft vendors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We weren't able to attend on Sunday, but it looked like there would be some fun activities that day. The schedule showed a parade, pie eating contest, tomahawk throw contest, and the Medicine Show in addition to many of the Saturday activities.


There is an 1899 school house, but we didn't visit it since Laura was never there and we've seen a few school houses at the other sites.