As I get older, the Fourth of July has become one of my least favorite holidays. It’s hot, buggy, and fraught with picnics. Bah humbug! But of course I loved it as a child, with its combinations of family, food, firecrackers, and parades. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s early experience was like my own. A community picnic in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, was her first memory of the occasion. “Mary and I had never been to a 4^th of July celebration and we were excited about it all. Ma packed fried chicken, bread and butter, cake and a lemon pie in our basket and all dressed up in our best we road in the wagon to the picnic grounds.” There, a platform and board seats had been erected and community leaders read the country’s founding documents and gave speeches, while others led the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A man and woman sang a duet, and people visited into the evening. Wilder, at eight or nine, confessed that she preferred the singing over the talking and reading.¹ As celebrations go, it was a modest one and did not compare with the community events in De Smet that Wilder later recalled and elaborated on in her novels Little Town on the Prairie (pp. 63–85) and These Happy Golden Years (pp. 147­–50).² Such events, put on by proud community leaders, included all the pageantry that small towns could muster, including horse races, ball games, speeches, pageants, parades, dancing, and patriotic fanfare.³

The 1909 Independence Day parade and picnic in Philip, South Dakota, is indicative of the sort of extravaganza Wilder experienced. South Dakota State Historical Society Archives

But the simple picnic that Wilder described in Pioneer Girl and the family meal in These Happy Golden Years, which again features fried chicken, pie, and a cold pitcher of lemonade (p. 149), remind me of the holiday that I had loved as a child, when the entire extended family gathered at my grandparents’ farm outside Gordon, Nebraska. Early in the morning on July Fourth, my grandmother would butcher chickens, and by dinnertime there would be roasters full of fried chicken to feed the hordes of children and grandchildren. We piled into the house, dusty and dirty from playing games and setting off firecrackers in the recently planted shelterbelt. We washed up and grazed our way down the tables of fried chicken, fresh cucumbers and cream, dressed garden lettuce, watermelon, potato salad, and shimmering molds of red and green Jello salads, cookies, cakes, and pies. Hauling our plates outside, we sat on blankets in the shade and listened to the adults talking about their work and their farms and readying ourselves for the fireworks display later that night. My mouth still waters when I think of that chicken, which I cannot duplicate today.

A typical Tystad family Fourth of July celebration, with a table groaning with food.

Sometimes we would go into Gordon for a veteran’s parade or a band concert or some other small-town event, but unlike the hometown celebrations in the 1870s and 1880s that Wilder described, our Fourths were not overtly patriotic as I recall. Our fathers had served in World War II and our grandfather was a veteran as well, but they were quiet about it. The joy of the day came in the sharing of food and exploding of fireworks with aunts and uncles and cousins, whom we might see but once or twice a year. We always made the occasion count, playing till we dropped into makeshift beds spread out around the house. For us, the day was deeply satisfying.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), p. 78.
2. Ibid., pp. 236, 303. Wilder also devotes a chapter to a community celebration in Farmer Boy, “Independence Day,” pp. 173–89.
3. John Miller, The Old-fashioned Fourth of July: A Photographic Essay on Small-town Celebrations Prior to 1930,” South Dakota History 17 (Summer 1987): 118–39.