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WALNUT GROVE

The spirit of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books still lives in the town where she grew up on the Minnesota prairie.

Every year in July, Walnut Grove welcomes visitors from near and far to take part in the Walnut Grove Family Festival from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays.

A good number of visitors came to the Family Festival Saturday wearing dresses and bonnets similar to what Laura and her Ma and sisters would have worn, including Anna Kate Murphy and Naomi Brennan from the Twin Cities. Lexie Whight of Michigan was also wearing a dress and bonnet and is so into the books she likes to be called "Laura."

Not only the visitors, but a number of the exhibitors were dressed in period clothing and their booths reflected the activities that were

common to the people of the 1800s, like the one where Ashley Lange, 13, of Burnsville sat with her spinning wheel. Her sister, Jessica, 10, had a ball of spun yarn she wanted to work with, but needed help from her grandmother, Connie Peterson, to find the end.

"The girls have been into living history since they were two years old," said Connie Peterson of Storden. "I taught them how to spin. Both knit, crochet and embroider. Both weave and have their own looms."

Connie Peterson was working on her own knitting and her husband, Norm Peterson, sat a few feet away carving a wooden spoon.

"I've done different types of woodworking pretty much all my life," he said. "I started carving spoons about seven-eight years ago."

"My husband and I do a lot of events," Connie Peterson said, adding they travel to Pepin, Wis., for the Laura Ingalls Wilder day there. They also appear at educational rendezvous and other events.

Wally Hunter was educating a crowd of about a dozen, mostly men, around his blacksmith anvil. He hammered metal as he explained what he was doing. While he reheated the metal for the next round of pounding, he answered questions, like how hot the fire needed to be and what the best fuel to use was.

Eryon Gregory said his favorite part of the festival was the blacksmithing he was watching.

"How he makes the stuff, heats it up," he said.

Cecilie Desormeaux also said she liked the blacksmith, even though she was making a cornhusk doll at the time in a class led by Julie Jakobi.

"I'd like to tell you I learned how to do it from my grandmother, but I got the directions off the Internet," Jakobi said with a laugh. "I grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and said I'd love to be here. Last weekend, we had the Lauras and Nellies (dress-alikes) here and I never stopped all weekend long."

The big crowd on Saturday was gathered around the Civil War demonstration. Young and old alike plugged their ears as the cannon was fired. The reverberating boom set off a nearby car alarm.

A quieter demonstration was an old-fashioned corn sheller operated by Ron Kelsey, who dropped the full ear of corn in one side, the corn kernels came out the bottom and the bare cob came out the other side.

"Corn shellers were invented at the turn of the century," he said. "Before that, the corn had to be shelled like this" and he demonstrated how to handshell it.

The corn and other seeds were used in his seed art booth.

"Take Elmer's Glue, a variety of seeds and make a picture with the different seeds," Kelsey said, adding there's a competition for seed art at the Minnesota State Fair. "The only state in the union that has seed art as a competition."

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about churning butter in more than one book and Darla Bloch could show people how it was done, on a much smaller scale.

Using a recipe from Kristen's Breakfast, she put heavy whipping cream in small glass jars, capped it tightly, then shook it until it separated into a butterball, which was washed and pressed, then put on crackers for eating.

"We want people to know what it was like in pioneer times," Bloch said. "You couldn't go to the store for everything.

"We have lost a lot of that (knowledge of how to do things)," she said. "We want to let people know about all the work they had to do."