Little House on the Florida frontier, revisited

This 30-page booklet sheds light on the
Wilder family's brief stay in frontier Florida

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about how Laura Ingalls Wilder lived on the Florida frontier for about a year in the early 1890s. 

I'd been surprised to learn that she, Almanzo, and their daughter, Rose, had settled briefly in the backwoods of rural Florida. And unsurprised to learn they'd left rather quickly.

Yankees and Old South residents didn't mix well in that time and place. The Wilders' short residency in Westville, FL, wasn't a happy one.

I wanted to learn more than I could glean from the Internet. Thanks to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association, I have. 

The association has long overseen production and distribution of a 30-page booklet about the Westville years. First published in 1979, Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Westville Florida Years is in its 7th printing. I purchased it via the association's online store (along with a couple of quilt patterns Laura was known to have followed).

An even bigger thanks goes to author Alene M. Warnock and her husband, James M. Warnock. Her curiosity and perserverence uncovered gems of information about descendents and the Ingalls-Wilder legacy in Florida. His photographs provide additional context and his essay about Westville "today"  - meaning the late 1970s - depicts a time as distant to us in 2020 as the 1890s are. 

Westville in the 1970s was smaller than it had been in the 1890s. I've never been to the community, but I expect it's smaller now than even in the 1970s. It hugs the Florida-Alabama border in the middle of nowhere. I did visit the region, though, a number of years ago. The countryside is beautiful.

I don't know if either of the Warnocks is still alive. If they are, I hope they know of my and many Wilder fans' appreciation of their efforts. But I suspect they have passed. I found a legacy.com obituary for an Alene M. Warnock who died in 2011 and whose husband, James, had predeceased her. 

I won't provide a lot of details about what's in their booklet. It only costs $3.50 and your purchase would help support a nonprofit. In fact, the little book would make a great stocking stuffer for your favorite Wilder fan or for yourself! 

Why should you read it? Because you'll find - among other treats -  that the Warnocks met and interviewed Laura's - niece? cousin once-removed? The woman, named Emma, was elderly in the 1970s and an important link to the past and to Laura's life story.

I'm not exactly sure how to term the relationship between Laura and "Miss Emma." The woman was the daughter of Laura's cousin Peter Ingalls, the person on whose homestead the Wilders probably settled for their year in Florida. The Warnocks found no evidence that Laura and Almanzo filed a homestead claim of their own. That the Warnocks found such a close relative of Laura's in the 1970s is a wonderful thing. 

The Warnocks did a lot of diligent searching and interviewing and traveling on their own time and dime. They shed needed light on the Wilder family's Westville detour. For that, this Wilder fan salutes them. As I hope many other Wilder fans have done and will do.

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Here's a link to the 2017 post I wrote about the family's sojourn in Florida. 

Little House on the Florida frontier

The Wilders in Florida. Laura doesn't seem happy 
to be here. Not sure of the original source of this
 photo or who gets credit. I found it on Pinterest. 

I'm a longtime fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame. But never, ever, did I realize until recently that she lived on the Florida frontier for a brief time.

I was so surprised when I read that fact in the book Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nancy Tystad Koupal, editor (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017). Laura's short Florida stay is mentioned in passing, but I halted in mid-sentence and set out to learn more.

Laura and her husband, Almanzo Wilder, and their daughter, Rose, spent most of 1891 and 1892 in the small, northern Florida town of Westville, which is tiny even now. The population today is less than 300. But Westville proclaims its sliver of Wilder history, I'm glad to say. So do other people. A Google search turns up all kinds of information.

There's a Laura Ingalls Wilder Homestead Park you can visit on County Road 163 in Westville. A historical marker stands at the site of the Wilder homestead and provides a brief history of Laura's time in Florida. Never have I been so anxious to read a sign. A little disappointed, maybe, to learn from it that the Wilders returned to the Dakota plains because Florida was too humid for Laura.

The sign also says Rose, as an adult, wrote a fictionalized account of the Florida sojourn and that the story won an O. Henry prize in 1922.  Can't wait to read the piece, which is titled "Innocence."

The Wilders made the odd detour to Florida because family was already living here. A 2012 article in the Chipley, Florida, newspaper about Laura says relatives still live in the area.

The article also includes an interesting comment from Laura about her stay in Florida. It makes me think more than the humidity affected her perspective of her new home:

"... we went to live in the piney woods of Florida, where the trees always murmur, where the butterflies are enormous, where plants that eat insects grow in moist places, where alligators inhabit the slowly moving waters of the rivers. But at the time and at that place a Yankee woman was more of a curiosity than these...”

She wasn't really a Yankee, of course, at least not in the sense that I think of Yankees (being one myself). But Westville is in Holmes County in the farthest reaches of northern Florida. It's practically a part of Alabama. In the early 1890s, some locals indeed might have been openly curious - and possibly resentful - about a Midwestern/Yankee woman trying to put down roots in the rural Old South.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum in Missouri offers a booklet about the family's Westville period. I've put it on my to-be-read list. I'm curious about what Laura writes about life on the Florida frontier.

One of the main reasons I like Laura's autobiography and novels about growing up on the American frontier is her attention to the details of daily living. To think she turned that lens of observation on pioneer Florida is a treasure, indeed.

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Postscript, 2018: I found and read the short story, "Innocence," through the Internet Archive digital library (https://archive.org). My take is that the locals were suspicious and possibly unfriendly to Laura during her stay in Florida. The cultural gaps had to be  enormous. Also, the short story has a sinister plot twist that I hope was fictional and not based on a true incident.

Postscript, 2020: I bought and read the booklet about Westville and the effort to uncover history about the family's time in frontier Florida. Here's a link to my post about it.