Wandering Missouri Wilderness, April 2024

 How was your Eclipse?

Mine so-so.  We did recover a bit of a good time, though.  

Things started out a bit late on Monday morning, we woke up an hour later than planned, but got our stuff in a bundle and got out of Maquoketa, Iowa, before 8 am.  The plan was to head Southeast and get into the path of totality somewhere near Southern Illinois/Missouri.

And all went pretty well and good until we got outside of St. Louis.  I was looking at getting into our target zone around 1:45, a bit before totality.  Then, south of St. Louis had several problems.  We had a fifteen-minute delay that turned into 20, 25, and finally 28 when I decided right around 1:40 to get off the road that wasn't moving, find a parking lot, and take a look.  So we tried.  And somewhere between Hillsboro and Festus Mo.  We were outside a small convenience store, in what my wife said was verified to be about 96%.  What I did see was about the same amount of sun (through the filter glasses my wife got) as the moon looked like tonight.  

At about 2:15 pm, after totality had moved northeast of us, we decided to find food and decide what to do next.  While eating at The Russell House, which had both excellent food and a dog-friendly patio, my wife did mention we were not too far from Mansfield, Missouri.  

Some of you are undoubtedly "So What" but Mansfield was the final home of my favorite pusher of a gateway item.  As a young kid, I did find, through my parents, a series of books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Before the TV show or anything else, she had been born in Wisconsin, moved around the upper midwest, eventually landing in southern Missouri, where her daughter helped to edit and enhance the stories her mother had written into best-selling books. 

Mind you, the books are both a product of their time AND a real piece of history.  They exhibit some of the thinking and behavior of people who spread out across the land thinking that they were civilizing and conquering a land and seemingly boundless resources which begged to be used.  It is both ironic and horrific that we've managed to really screw up many of those resources and that land.  

But to be honest, the attraction for me both then and now was the observed behavior and character of the people and their struggles.  And, at that age, the opportunity to read a big old book all by myself was pretty cool. 

What was also cool, were you a passenger, was the drive from Hillsboro to Ava.  Now, I am very aware that I grew up in a much flatter portion of the country.  Several miles of compacted ice and snow moving slowly across the landscape does have the effect of flattening things right out.  I do recall near my family's home we did have hills and valleys, most due to rivers and the like, but there was one odd hill in the middle of a rather large flat area.  It sort of popped out of the landscape much like a zit might on an otherwise lineless forehead.  

But from Hillsboro to Ava it seems that while flat was in short supply, it was available.  Level, now, was pretty damned hard to come by.  As was straight.  This road probably required some 60-70% additional mileage for all of the twists and turns.  Doing it at sunset and twilight, well...  That could not be helped, but it did make things a whole lot more ... stressful.  I'm sure the scenery was gorgeous.  What I saw was very focused onto the yellow and white lines of the road and watching for oncoming traffic.

We did, finally arrive at Ava, and stayed at the Super 8 there.  No hotels appeared in my wife's search for lodging in Mansfield, so Ava won.  And we did leave her new Walmart pillow there, so we did oops on that, unfortunately - undoubtedly my fault.  

When we got to the Wilder homestead and museum, we found it well-preserved and not too busy.  The number of large families that we encountered was not too surprising.  Both houses were well-preserved, which is the point of the exercise, but there wasn't a whole lot of what I'd consider profiteering going on.  Yeah, across the street from the houses is a "Laura Ingalls Wilder RV Park" which did not strike me as overly greedy - then again, I didn't park an RV in it.  

I do have to admit that there's a great deal of impressive work there.  I don't just mean the houses.  Well, I guess in one case I do.  The very long story short is there are two houses there.  The first one built is The Farm House.  The second one built was by Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's daughter, who wanted to do something for her parents.  She bought plans from Sears Roebuck - remember them?  Yeah.  Another bit of American History shoved into the toilet thanks to greed and incompetence.  

But before I digress to far off the path, Rose bought the plans, then sold the rights to the serial which she would write about building the house for $10,000 - she was by then an accomplished writer, so it wasn't a far stretch.  But the materials and everything else cost around $11,000, so the house netted out costing her about a grand.  Not bad.  

The Stone House, the house Rose built, was on the south side of a small hill, in a wooded grove.  On the northern side of the hill was the original farm house.  Initially, Laura and her husband Almanzo moved into a log cabin on the property, then added a room the second winter.  They then started on the main house, and dragged the new room from the log cabin up to the new house location.  Over the next seventeen years they built a house customized for Laura's short stature - she was barely five feet tall, they have a cut-out picture of her standing in the kitchen of the farm house.  Other than that, everything is as they left it, as much as the curators could insure.  

Some cabinets in the Stone House had been removed during a remodel, and when the Wilder Trust took over and started the restoration, they inventoried everything, all of the buildings on the property, and found kitchen cabinets in one of the barns.  They looked them over and found a railroad tag specifying their delivery to A. Wilder, Mansfield Missouri, and they assured the finish was as close to period, and permanent, as possible, then reinstalled them in the Stone House kitchen.

The Farmhouse, where Laura and Almanzo lived until the Stone house was complete, then when moved out of the Farm House and headed back East, Laura and Almanzo returned to the farmhouse because Laura said she was "homesick".  

I was amazed at not just the level of craftsmanship but the raw ability.  I remember a passage from Farmer Boy, which Laura had written about the childhood of Almanzo.  He had used a piece of broken glass to shave smooth a piece of wood - without sandpaper or any other form of final prep, most woodworking pieces of the time showed saw and other marks.

In the front parlor of the farm house is a walnut root, cut off about 24" tall, and topped with a slab of live-edge walnut, a sort of thing we used to call, when I worked for the tree service company, a "Cookie" - a slice across the tree, a sort of slab, showing the growth rings.  This table was simply spectacular.  Any woodworker of today would be honored and extremely proud having produced it with our modern tools - to have done it with nothing more than hand tools?  Amazing.