After discussing the situation, Laura and Almanzo decided to purchase the farm. Court records indicate that they paid Thomas M. White and his wife, Charlotte, $400 on Friday, September 21, three weeks after their arrival in town. What the records do not reveal, however, is that in the meantime the family went through a crisis, temporarily losing the $100 bill that Laura had carefully tucked away at the beginning of their journey. Upon discovering its disappearance, she and Almanzo could think only that Rose might have told someone about it or that it had been stolen. Rose recalled afterward how angry and insulted she had felt at the suggestion that she might have betrayed the family's secret. But luckily the bill was found several days later after more fiddling around with the writing desk; it somehow had slipped into a crack.13
The significance of the $100 bill in family legend probably multiplied over the years; Laura once told Missouri Ruralist editor John Case that they had lacked only $150 to pay for the forty acres, and another time she indicated that they had put a mortgage of $200 on the farm, which was half the price. The former owners had managed to clear only four acres, on which two hundred apple trees had been planted the previous year. Four times that many saplings were set out in nursery rows near the house, ready for replanting as soon as more land was cleared.14
The house was a windowless log cabin perched on the edge of a ravine. It had a fireplace that could be used for heating and cooking, and, of course, there was plenty of timber on the property. Rose and Laura quickly started cleaning the house, and then the few pieces of furniture they had brought with them were moved in. Now Laura, who had lived in so many little houses—including a variety of sod dwellings and log cabins—was settled into another one.
Almanzo and Laura began clearing trees and chopping them into firewood to sell in town. During their first year or two at Rocky Ridge, the wood they took into town and the income they received from their flock of hens provided what cash they needed for groceries, clothing, and other necessary items. “It was hard work and sometimes short rations at the first, but gradually the difficulties were overcome,” Laura later recalled. Almanzo's poor health continued to restrict his activities. “Mr. Wilder was unable to do a full day's work,” Laura told a journalist. “The garden, my hens and the wood I helped saw and which we sold in town took us through the first year. It was then I became an expert at the end of a cross-cut saw and I still can ‘make a hand’ in an emergency. Mr. Wilder says he would rather have me help than any man he ever sawed with. And, believe me, I learned how to take care of hens and to make them lay.” Not all of the lumber was sold in town. Some of the logs were used for fencing their land, and others went into building a barn and a henhouse. By the spring of 1895, they had managed to clear about half their land and get it ready to plant their apple trees and crops.15
Meanwhile, Rose went to school on the east edge of town. The school was a two-story brick building with four rooms and was only three years old, having replaced the original two-room schoolhouse. Rose already was a good reader, and she was able to beat the other students in her age group in spelling bees. She worked her way through the McGuffey's Readers and also read books in geography and American history and a large volume on ancient, medieval, and modern history. Her teachers quickly recognized her exceptional intelligence and allowed her to take books home from the school library, which consisted of a row of volumes on a shelf in one of the upstairs rooms. Winter evenings, with the family gathered around the fireplace in their cabin, Almanzo oiled harnesses and worked on other tasks, Rose did her arithmetic and played at building corncob houses, and Laura knitted or read by the light of a kerosene lamp. All three of them could thrill to the adventures of Ivanhoe and James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, transport themselves back into history with Prescott's Conquest of Mexico and Parkman's Oregon Trail, or imagine themselves partaking in the exploits of The Green Mountain Boys, Ben Hur, or John Halifax, Gentleman. They also had their own little library of Tennyson's and Scott's poems.16
The Cooleys, who had moved into town to manage a hotel, exchanged visits with the Wilders from time to time, and neighbors and new acquaintances sometimes dropped in for popcorn or just to visit. Laura obtained a reputation for her tasty gingerbread, one of her specialties. Sunday, as always, was a day of rest and for attending church. Picnics in the woods or in shady ravines were always fun. Laura and Almanzo enjoyed riding horseback, and they purchased a donkey and named it Spookendyke, so Rose could learn to ride, too, and take him to school with her. Unfortunately, he seemed to enjoy bucking her off more than carrying her on his back, and she quickly grew to detest him.17
The following year a frame room with some windows was added to the cabin, and in the spring of 1896 Laura and Almanzo detached the new room from the cabin, moved it several feet, and added on another new room with a loft above for Rose to sleep in. The old cabin, meanwhile, was converted into a barn. The additions would take a number of years, but eventually the new house would become something of a “showplace” in the area.18
The first three years the Wilders were in Missouri the country continued to wallow in economic depression, emerging only during the latter part of 1897. Ruined businesses, massive unemployment, depressed farm prices, industrial armies roaming the countryside in search of bread and jobs all contributed to unprecedented class conflict and a desperate search for political panaceas. Some people discovered their messiahs in various radical organizations and leaders; in the most heavily hit farm areas, the Populist Party and its banner-carrier in 1896, William Jennings Bryan, emerged as popular heroes. Four decades later, during the Great Depression, Rose implied that her family had been among those caught up in the mood of insurgency and had become followers of the “Silver-tongued orator of the Platte.” In her introduction to her collection of Mansfield-inspired stories, Old Home Town, she recalled the white, yellow, and purple asters (they called them chrysanthemums) that grew up along the fences in people's yards. “To me,” she wrote, “a yellow aster still stands for the hated gold standard; the white aster means William Jennings Bryan, whose free coinage of silver would have taken us back to prosperity. But Bryan was defeated by the soulless corporations and our country was forever ruined.”19
How much of this political drama from her childhood Rose actually remembered (she was only nine at the time), how much of it derived from information that she picked up later and projected back onto her own past (for example, her estimate of Coxey's Army being sixty thousand strong was wildly inflated), and how much these radical attitudes actually characterized Laura and Almanzo is difficult to say. During the early years of their marriage, they identified themselves with the Democratic Party, which then was not particularly progressive or reform minded. At the time of the Wilders’ arrival in 1894, Mansfield and Wright County remained heavily Republican, generally delivering majorities in the range of two to one for party candidates. Before the Civil War, Democratic candidates had usually prevailed by similar margins. The Ozarks, for the most part, were decidedly Republican during the late 1800s, despite having large numbers of families originating below the Mason-Dixon line.20
Prosperity was returning by 1898, but Laura and Almanzo decided that moving into town might make it easier for them to make ends meet. Until this time, living at Rocky Ridge could never have provided them with much more than a hand-to-mouth existence, since the farm produced little besides timber that could be marketed for cash. Their apple trees would not start to bear fruit for seven years. They managed to hold onto their property and even expanded it a little in May 1897 by purchasing six acres along the eastern edge for three dollars each. (The farm eventually totaled approximately two hundred acres.) Laura practiced extreme frugality, a habit that sometimes frustrated Rose and may have contributed in a roundabout way to her own spendthrift tendencies.21
Almanzo and Laura rented a small one-story house on the east edge of Mansfield, just north of the railroad tracks. Almanzo now was able to have a regular job in town, and they could
still easily maintain the farm. After Frank Cooley died, Almanzo approached Emma and bought the draying business from her, including the team and wagon. Laura set up a boarding table in their house and began serving meals to traveling salesmen and other passengers who came through on the trains, as well as to railroad employees. Because of his new dray line, Almanzo spent much time around the depot, putting him in an ideal position to recommend his wife's good cooking to the men he met.22
During the summer of 1898, Almanzo's parents and his widowed sister, Laura, stopped off in Mansfield for an extended stay while on their way to their new home in Crowley, Louisiana. Perley Wilder had already gone to live there, and Eliza Jane had persuaded Laura and her parents to join them there, too. James Wilder had sold their farm in Spring Valley for several thousand dollars and had invested most of the proceeds in Louisiana rice lands. Before he left Mansfield, James, who was eighty-five years old, put up the money for Almanzo and Laura to purchase the house they had been renting. They paid $450 for it on June 22, but it would take them several more years to save enough money to pay off the mortgage on Rocky Ridge.23
Living in Mansfield made Rose one of the town girls who had previously looked down their noses at her as a country girl. Now, rather than having to ride—or try to ride—Spookendyke to school, she walked only several blocks. While Mansfield was a typical, quiet country town, some of the things one could see and do there could be exciting to an eleven year old. Several times a day trains rumbled by on the tracks bordering on the family's backyard. Near the depot, drummers and other traveling men came and went, and one could watch the telegraph operator clicking off messages to distant places. Around the square on the north side of the tracks, teams and wagons and buggies were tied up. And there were always people one could observe in the stores and on the sidewalks, going about their business or stopping to chat with friends.
Much later Rose resurrected the town as it had appeared to her when they first drove into it:
We passed a big Reynolds General Store, with two large windows full of things, the door between them. Men were loafing, whittling, talking and spitting along the high board walk. There were small stores, The Bank of Mansfield, a Boston Racket Store with “Opera House” painted on the windows upstairs, Hoover's Livery Stable and horses in a feed lot, then another big house inside a wire fence. Past a blacksmith shop the dusty road went downhill to cross a little bridge.24
In Mansfield, as in other towns, the Fourth of July and Decoration Day were the biggest days of the year. Patriotism was put on enthusiastic display. Missouri was a border state, and many families in and around Mansfield derived from Southern roots, but the Union veterans in the Grand Army of the Republic maintained a high visibility and worked hard during election time for the Republican cause. The Women's Christian Temperance Union also played an active role in the community. Mansfield was a big lodge town, with active chapters of Masons, Odd Fellows, Rebekahs, and Royal Neighbors. Almanzo was a Mason, like Laura's father, and both Laura and Almanzo were involved in Eastern Star. She normally held an office, as they were passed around among the membership from year to year, serving as warden, secretary, worthy matron, and in other positions.25
There was little to distinguish Mansfield from other small towns. Its location along a major railroad route conferred considerable advantage on it, compared with its neighbors to the north and south with no railroad connections. The Kansas City, Fort Scott, and Memphis Railroad, in fact, had been responsible for originally establishing the town when it laid its tracks through southern Missouri in 1881. White settlement in Wright County had begun a half century earlier, during the 1830s. Before then, the area had been home to Osage Indians as well as to Delawares, Shawnees, and other tribal groups. Herds of buffalo roamed through it at one time, and the woods were full of deer, elk, and other animals. The county seat of Hartville, twelve miles to the north, had been founded in the early 1840s. A colony of several hundred black people grew up near it after the Civil War, but Mansfield had few or no blacks living in it. The area around Hartville, in the center of the county, grew up rapidly during the 1840s and 1850s, but the southern part lagged until the coming of the railroad. The largest town in the county—Mountain Grove, twenty miles east of Mansfield—originated in the 1850s, long before the railroad arrived. When the rail link was completed in 1881, Mountain Grove took advantage of its head start. Mansfield also benefited heavily from the trade generated by the railroad. The smaller towns of Norwood to the east and Cedar Gap to the west also got their start with the building of the railroad, but both lagged behind Mansfield and Mountain Grove in population.26
By the turn of the century Mansfield had grown to 494 residents, but its population actually declined—to 477—during the following decade. Hartville was overtaken by Mountain Grove between 1900 and 1910, as the former's population declined from 1,762 to 1,660 while the latter's jumped from 1,004 to 1,722. With the advent of automobiles and trucks, the advantages enjoyed by Mountain Grove and Mansfield, located along a major highway as well as on the main line of railroad between Memphis and Springfield, were reinforced. The railroad tracks followed the path of an old Indian trail sitting astride an east-west ridge of hills across the southern Missouri Ozarks. Cedar Gap, five miles west of Mansfield, at 1,685 feet above sea level, was situated on the highest point in the area and had the second highest elevation in the state.27
Many of the earliest white settlers who entered the region during the decades preceding the Civil War originated in areas of similar topography farther east, mainly in the upland zones of eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky. Tennesseans, who predominated among the earliest arrivals, brought their social and cultural traditions with them. Many of the initial settlers were of Scotch-Irish background, an influence of continuing importance over time. Presbyterianism was strong in the Ozarks, supplemented by active cohorts of Methodists and Baptists. Presbyterians and Methodists organized congregations in Mansfield in 1883 and 1884, respectively. Local Baptists had to attend the Mount Pleasant congregation out in the country until they built their own church in Mansfield in 1909. Meanwhile, Catholics were active in Mansfield as early as 1893. Services were conducted by a visiting priest who came from Mountain Grove after 1900, but it was not until around World War II that the first resident priest was established in the community.28
With no Congregational church in Mansfield, the Wilders affiliated themselves with the Methodist church. While never formally establishing membership in the congregation, they actively participated in its activities for many years, until age slowed them down. For many years the Methodists had to share their minister with other towns in the area. Southern Missouri's religious traditions, like many other local habits and customs, required some adjustment on Laura and Almanzo's part. While many aspects of the culture were familiar to them—religious revivals, Fourth of July celebrations, pie suppers, band concerts, workings, social visiting, and the like—there was also much that was new. All-day songfests (usually hymn sings on Sundays in the summer) and regularly scheduled court days in the county seat (when people drove in from miles around and made the trials their entertainment) differed considerably from their experiences in South Dakota. The Wilders also struggled with the local speech habits and Ozark twang. While Ozarks dwellers could be just as friendly and outgoing as anywhere else, they had obtained a somewhat deserved reputation for remaining standoffish among strangers. Traditional rural isolation was beginning to break down by around the turn of the century, however, and during succeeding decades regional characteristics continued to converge with those of the rest of the country. Their locations on major transportation routes running along the “backbone” of the Ozarks, connecting Springfield and points to the east, ensured that Mansfield and other towns like it would be less prone to remain backward and clannish.29
As modernizing trends made their influence felt in the region, patterns of resistance drove some local residents to try to maintain their old w
ays of living. Most people welcomed higher living standards and technological improvements, but they often expressed concern about changes that appeared to challenge traditional habits and values. In Old Home Town, Rose described just how provincial, conservative, and suspicious Ozarks dwellers could be; the fictional town obviously was based upon her own experiences growing up in Mansfield during the early 1900s. In her descriptions, the town's residents were, for the most part, narrow-minded, gossipy, overly concerned about other people's opinions, and censorious of their actions. The town was, most of the time, a dull place; the houses displayed no more architectural distinction than boxes, and little beauty prevailed. While a few substantial houses and businesses did exist on the south side of the tracks, the railroad—as was typically the case everywhere—separated the “good” side of town from the “poor” side, otherwise known as “poverty flat.” Girls from families living on the north side of the tracks turned up their noses at poor girls from the south side of town.30
The tone of Rose's stories was generally ironic and condescending, critical, for the most part, of the narrow expectations, the prudery, the single-minded acquisitiveness, the excessive social control, and the lack of benevolence prevailing among the townspeople. By 1935, however, when she sat down to write an introduction that would tie these stories together and would describe in more detail the look and feel of the town, Rose had moderated her point of view and now professed to discern greater wisdom in the kinds of attitudes and actions that she had witnessed thirty years earlier. Now she focused on the moral softness and political fuzzy-mindedness of Americans that had become apparent to her by the middle of the depression decade.
Rose admitted, with regard to her own childhood in Mansfield:
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Page 13
