Just over 50 years ago, Little House on the Prairie was introduced to TV audiences, and since that first episode, the series has never been off the air. It has generated a fan base that appeals to many from little girls to people in nursing homes. It encourages people to wear prairie dresses and bonnets. There are dozens of fan pages on Facebook, and those fans seek the opportunity for meet and greets, autographs and pictures with the characters they love.
Many fans of the TV show were fans of the books first, but the show introduced generations of viewers to the Little House series, and eventually to Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author. That includes residents in Wayne, like Kimberley Endicott.
Now it is time for the fans of the Little House books, the TV show and Mr. and Mrs. Wilder to honor Jim Hicks, an Illinois high school physics teacher who proves and demonstrates the physics within the Little House series and Nancy Koupal’s contribution to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy as the spearhead of the Pioneer Girl Project from the South Dakota State Historical Society Press. They are recipients of the 2025 Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association (LIWLRA) Legacy Award, which will be presented at this year’s LauraPalooza conference.
LauraPalooza 2025 will be held July 9-11 at the Holiday Inn City Centre in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with a conference-ending day trip to DeSmet, South Dakota, the setting for the last five books in the Little House series, By The Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years and The First Four Years.
Interest in Laura Ingalls Wilder has seen a large resurgence in recent years, in part thanks to the 50th Anniversary of the television series last year, 2019 PBS American Masters episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser, an upcoming Netflix series based upon the books and continuing references in popular TV shows like The Big Bang Theory and books like A Prairie Faith, and former Legacy Award recipient, Dean Butler’s Prairie Man. But for Endicott, Wilder’s life and books is a life passion, which led her to first become a member of LIWLRA and eventually a member of the organization’s board of directors.
“I became interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder as a child. I read her books in the second grade and watched reruns of the television show. Each of them provided hours of entertainment and it also made my imagination run wild, so I was always playing make believe, Laura Ingalls Wilder,” said Endicott.
Endicott first learned about LauraPalooza because of a Facebook article found by her mother, Nancy, in 2015. Since the first conference, Endicott and her fellow participants learned details about specific incidents from the books (the location of the seed wheat in The Long Winter and the Brewster school in These Happy Golden Years), the rocky relationship between Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Ingalls and Wilder ancestry and stories of their pioneer travels, and international reaction to the books (the conference attracts attendees from all over the world). Each LauraPalooza ends with a day trip to a “home site,” one of the many towns Wilder lived in and wrote about.
One of Endicott’s favorite memories of LauraPalooza happened during the last conference in 2022. The field trip was to the boyhood home of Laura’s husband Almanzo, in upstate New York. Getting to see the actual house where Almanzo grew up and getting to wade in the trout river where he would go fishing was a wonderful experience. Growing up in Nebraska and being close to a lot of Laura’s homesites, she didn’t know if she would ever get to New York.
Endicott is the former Vice President of the LIWLRA, current Treasurer and homesite liaison of the organization. Last summer she was interviewed by two documentarians as she traveled through the midwest in support of the LIWLRA during the 50th Anniversary of the NBC television show. One of those documentaries will be shown in Sioux Falls. It is entitled, Little House Homecoming.
Reflecting over the past 10 years since her first LauraPalooza, Endicott says, “While we are all there to learn about Laura, there is something life changing about the friendships made during these conferences. I have friends all over the world. We often meet in Laura specific spots in non-conference years just to catch up and talk about the author that brought them all together. Beyond that, it's meeting up when someone’s child has a ball game in a near by town, traveling together to a non-Laura site for a vacation with ‘Laura Friends’, being there for each other in times of crisis and celebration. Laura is a gift in my life that just keeps on giving.”
LauraPalooza is an academic conference, but one doesn’t have to be a PhD or a researcher to attend. You don’t need to be a librarian or a writer, either, although you’ll meet a lot of those at the conference, many of whom discovered Wilder through their own careers and passions. But you’ll also meet people who are huge fans of the television show first and came to the books later in the life, and those who are collectors of Laura-related artifacts. What brings everyone together is the love of Laura Ingalls Wilder, no matter how you got there.
Anyone interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder, her life and her books and the TV show, is welcome to attend this year’s LauraPalooza event and to join the LIWLRA. For more information, visit the organization’s website at www.liwlra.org or visit our Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association Facebook page at @LIWLegacy.
