Little House gathering
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WALNUT GROVE -- The Wilder Pageant hosted its second week of performances over the weekend. But this week brought along new and familiar faces to longtime fans of the Little House books and show.
Actresses, historians and people with direct connections to the Ingalls family arrived over the weekend to host a fundraiser for the Walnut Grove Area Foundation.
The dinner and fundraiser were put on by Sidney Robyn Greenbush, who played Laura's little sister Carrie Ingalls for nine seasons of the show.
"When you watch the opening credits and you see the little girl run and fall down, that’s actually me, and that’s my character.” Greenbush said.
Today, she runs her own website called Greenbush Twins & Company where they host products approved by Greenbush herself. She said she tries to find products that are locally made and more environmentally sustainable. The website can be found by searching greenbushtwins.com.
Products from Greenbush's website were put up in a silent auction at the dinner and meet and greet. According to Greenbush, all proceeds went to the Walnut Grove Area Foundation.
Greenbush has visited Walnut Grove a few times for tours and meet and greets. Charlotte Yerke, however, a script supervisor for eight years on the show, it marked the first time she saw the creek, the town, and the prairie the show she worked on for so long based itself.
According to Yerke, when she was just 20 years old, she toured the set for a day to see the process of making the show and working behind the scenes.
“So one time we went up to Sonora. They were filming the campout episode, we went and visited the set where they were doing, and we get back and she (the current script supervisor) says, ‘I’m going to take you to work with me on this next show.'”
Before she knew it, she had a full-time job working behind the scenes and keeping track of everyone, each button on the shirt, each hairstyle and each place everyone stood.
Yerke said she has so many fond memories of working on the show she can hardly tell them all. But when working on the Little House episode 'Blizzard" -- the events of which also happen at the pageant -- Yerke remembers two huge containers filled to the brim with white pieces of plastic. When the time came for shots of the blizzard outside, they would dump the plastic on wind machines, which blew the plastic around wildly.
"It went everywhere, we had it in our hair, we had it stuck inside our clothes." Yerke said.
The weekend marked the first time Michelle and Jennifer Steffin -- actresses for Rosie in seasons eight and nine -- got to see Walnut Grove and the Wilder Pageant as well.
“I wish my son would have come (to the pageant) because he did theater and drama for high school all four years," Michelle Steffin said. "So to see that kind of production compared to a high school production where it’s just on the stage, I think he would like that, and it’s pretty cool because it’s years, generations of Walnut Grove in it, and it’s 50 years next year.”
These days, the Steffin twins work with The Society of the Ingalls Family to create and preserve the many historical sites, buildings and memorials to Laura Ingalls and the people that surround her. Currently, the twins said they are fundraising to get a headstone for baby Wilder Lane, a stillborn child and last direct descendant of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
"This generation is going to start collecting everything and start wanting to visit certain sites and we need to keep it going." Michelle Steffin said.
Working with the Steffin Twins on their preservation effort is Michelle Underwood, a historian and tour guide at Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri. According to Underwood, the farm is where Ingalls spent her retirement.
Being a tour guide made Underwood realize how many people, including famous people, were affected by the Laura Ingalls story. Underwood recalls meeting and touring for Laura Bush, the wife of George W. Bush, and Bethany Hamilton just a week after seeing her documentary “Soul Surfer.”
Through her time being a tour guide she would get so many questions from people that were impossible to answer in the short time frame. She said she decided to work on a book where she could answer all those questions.
"It’s a love, so I don’t consider it work," Underwood said. "You know, when I actually gotta go back and forth with the editing process, and that’s the work, you know. But the writing part, that’s the joy of it. That’s the love of it, you know.”
Underwood’s newest book -- “Loving Laura” -- was recently released and includes a collection of letters and recountings of Laura’s life. It can be found on Amazon.
Another attendee working toward the effort of preserving the Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder is Historian Laura Ingalls Gunn, a relative of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She currently works on remaking the many dresses of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
So far, she has recreated 20 dresses that Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family would have worn while traveling the American frontier. Her research has given her the opportunity to write a book “The outfits of Little House” which will be releasing sometime soon, she said.
"It wasn’t too long ago that I got involved with Laura Ingalls Wilder and now I get to attend all these events and meet all these amazing people," Ingalls Gunn said. "I've said a prayer of gratitude every day since then."