Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder (7 February 1867 – 10 February 1957) was an American author best known for her Little House on the Prairie series of children’s books, published between 1932 and 1943 and based on her childhood in a pioneer and settler family.
Read this article to understand What age was Laura Ingalls when she wed?
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Who Was Laura Ingalls?
American author Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder is best known for the Little House on the Prairie children’s book series, which was released between 1932 and 1943 and was based on her time growing up in a settler and pioneer family.
A loose adaptation of the books, the 1974–1983 television series Little House on the Prairie starred Melissa Gilbert as Laura and Michael Landon as her father, Charles Ingalls.
Charles Phillip and Caroline Lake (née Quiner) Ingalls welcomed Laura Elizabeth into the world on February 7, 1867. The family resided seven miles north of the Wisconsin village of Pepin, in the Big Woods region, at the time of Ingalls’ birth.
Little House in the Big Woods, her debut book, was set in Ingalls’ Pepin home (1932). She came after her older sister, Mary Amelia, in a family of five.
Caroline Celestia (Carrie), Charles Frederick, who passed away in infancy, and Grace Pearl would be the next three children. At the Little House Wayside in Pepin, a replica log cabin honours Ingalls Wilder’s birthplace.
How Old Was Laura Ingalls When She Got Married?
In the book These Happy Golden Years, Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder. She was eighteen years old when she married Almanzo, who was twenty-eight years older than her.
Today, eighteen may seem like a young age to get married, but in the past, it was quite common to get married at eighteen, and some even married at sixteen.
How Was Laura Ingalls Marriage?
Their early years of marriage were challenging. Almanzo suffered from partial paralysis as a result of complications from a potentially fatal case of diphtheria in 1888. He eventually regained almost full use of his legs, but for the rest of his life, he required a cane to walk.
The loss of their newborn son, the mysterious fire that destroyed their barn and all of its hay and grain, the total loss of their home due to a fire Rose started by accident, and several years of severe drought left them in debt, physically ill, and unable to make a living from their 320 acres (129.5 hectares) of prairie land were just a few of the unfortunate events that followed this setback, among many others.
The First Four Years by Wilder contains information about these trials (published in 1971). They left De Smet around 1890 and rested at Almanzo’s parent’s house on their farm in Spring Valley, Minnesota for about a year before making a brief move to Westville, Florida, in search of a climate that would be better for Almanzo’s health.
But they discovered that Westville’s humidity was very different from the dry plains they were used to. They felt out of place in the community and the weather prompted them to return to De Smet in 1892, where they bought a modest house.
How Was Laura Ingalls Writing Career?
As a result of a request to submit an article to the Missouri Ruralist in 1911, Wilder was offered a permanent position there as a columnist and editor, which she held there until the mid-1920s.
Additionally, she accepted a paid position with the neighbourhood Farm Loan Association, which provided small loans to nearby farmers. As a Farm Woman Thinks,” Wilder’s column in the Ruralist, introduced her to a devoted group of rural Ozarkians who read her regular columns.
Her subjects included home and family, including her 1915 trip to San Francisco, California, to visit her now-married daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, and see the Pan-Pacific exhibition, as well as World War I and other global events, Lane’s fascinating world travels, and her own thoughts on the expanding options available to women at the time.
The couple didn’t become wealthy until the “Little House” books gained popularity, but they did have a comfortable lifestyle thanks to their farming business, Wilder’s writing income, and the Farm Loan Association.
According to Professor John E. Miller, by 1924, Wilder had developed into a disciplined writer who could create thoughtful, approachable prose for a broad audience after spending more than a decade writing for farm papers.”
Around this time, Lane, Wilder’s daughter, started urging her strongly to work on her writing in order to achieve greater success as a writer than Lane had. Miller claimed that the Wilders had grown to “[depend] on annual income subsidies from their daughter’s increasing fame and success.”
They had both come to the conclusion that Wilder should become a successful writer in order to increase their retirement income. To begin with, Lane assisted Wilder in getting two articles describing the farmhouse’s interior published in Country Gentleman magazine.
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The “project never advanced very far,” though. In 1928, Lane hired a contractor to build her parents an English-style stone cottage on a plot of land next to the farmhouse they had personally built and were still living in.
She took control after remodelling. The Wilders were completely destroyed by the 1929 stock market crash, and Lane’s investments suffered similarly.
The 200-acre (81-hectare) farm was still theirs, but they had invested the majority of their savings with Lane’s broker. In 1930, Wilder asked Lane for her opinion on a manuscript she had written about her early days as a pioneer.
It appears that Wilder was inspired to record her memories in a life story titled Pioneer Girl by the Great Depression, her mother’s passing in 1924, and the deaths of her older sister and sister-in-law in 1928. She also hoped that writing would bring in some extra money.
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