It is with great sadness that I share that Noel L. Silverman, longtime legal counsel of the Little House Heritage Trust, passed away on 14 April 2026. He lived a long and fruitful life, and I am proud to have called him my friend for the last fifteen years. Noel represented the Wilder trust since its founding in 1995 until he retired in 2025. Before that, he was attorney for Roger MacBride, Rose Wilder Lane’s heir. He served as a dedicated steward to the literary heritage that is contained in the Little House series of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the novels and works of Lane. I remember him telling a story that illustrated his complete devotion to the trust that had been assigned to him. He admitted that in an impromptu setting while on a cruise he had inadvertently introduced himself as Laura Ingalls Wilder—a telling mistake. For many of us in the world of Wilder scholarship, he was indeed the face of Wilder. Noel served as the gatekeeper to anyone wanting permission to quote from or reproduce Wilder’s and Lane’s works.

I met Noel just that way, asking the Trust’s permission to publish Wilder’s unpublished memoir, “Pioneer Girl,” and the manuscripts associated with it. Over the years, I came to know him and his wife, Tanya Melich. They were a fascinating couple, who lived and worked in the heart of Manhattan. Noel had graduated from Brown University and Harvard Law School and was a man of many talents. He worked for a time as a jazz musician and maintained his love for and involvement in the world of jazz all his life. My husband and I were honored to attend his birthday parties as he attained his ninth decade. On one of those occasions, we met the author and illustrator Brian O. Selznick, best known for his 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret—just one of the talented people whom Noel represented through the years. Noel and Tanya invited us into their home again when we were celebrating my birthday in New York last fall. As always, their conversation was lively and provocative, ranging from politics to philosophy to art.

As many of us know, however, Noel’s professionalism could be intimidating. The first few times I talked to him, I literally stuttered my way through the discussion. But he was always kind to me, even though he was no nonsense when it came to business—and Wilder was his business. He was serious and thoughtful about her legacy. When I asked him if he could explain Wilder’s enduring appeal to readers, he told me: “Wilder’s ongoing popularity is largely a consequence of the message she conveyed, although it was more often than not conveyed subliminally. Her stories take you with her and deliver you to a place where, without having listened to a lecture, you recognize that you bear principal responsibility for the things over which you exercise control, and that you often have more influence over those things than you perhaps first imagined. Action is important. Decency is important. Perseverance works. Reciprocity works. Compassion works.”¹

While I will miss him in the years to come, I am deeply grateful to have walked alongside him for a time and to have shared his vision of Wilder. May he rest in peace.

Noel Silverman speaks at the South Dakota State Historical Society’s annual meeting in Sioux Falls, 2017.

––Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Silverman, “Her Stories Take You with Her: The Lasting Appeal of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017), p. 141.

Vacationing in Florida this winter, I spent some time exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder’s brief sojourn there in the early 1890s. In pursuit of a better climate for Almanzo, who suffered in the cold of the Midwest, the Wilder family—Almanzo, Laura, and daughter Rose—traveled to the Florida Panhandle in October 1891. They planned to connect with her cousin Peter Ingalls, who had taken a homestead near Westville in Holmes County and married a local girl named Mary (“Molly”) McGowin.¹ Wilder and Almanzo would help Peter farm corn, cotton, peanuts, and sweet potatoes in what Wilder referred to as “the piney woods of Florida, where the trees always murmur, where the butterflies are enormous, where plants that eat insects grow in moist places, and alligators inhabit the slowly moving waters of the rivers. But at that time and in that place, a Yankee woman was more of a curiosity than any of these.”² Wilder’s statement immediately connected with me. She had not been able to find a place for herself as a northern woman among the people of the Florida Panhandle, just as I had not been able to blend in among the folk of the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky when I moved there as a young bride in the 1970s.

Laura and Almanzo Wilder in Florida, ca. 1892. Courtesy Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum

The only known photograph of the Wilders in Florida gives some context to Wilder’s characterization of herself as a curiosity. Standing next to Almanzo, who is seated, she wears a blouse with enormous leg-of-mutton sleeves, and her whole outfit seems out of place amid the Florida foliage. It is also in sharp contrast to the clothes worn by the impoverished local people as portrayed in “Innocence,” the award-winning short story Rose Wilder Lane published in 1922. Much of our understanding of the Wilders’ time in the panhandle is filtered through this story, which is set in the piney woods, where making and selling moonshine is the occupation of many of the residents, as it was in the hollers of Floyd County, Kentucky, when my husband and I lived there. As a type of self-protection, many of the people in such backwoods counties reject outsiders’ ways and fashions, an attitude that Lane describes in “Innocence.” Lane’s character Molly, based on Peter’s wife, is dressed simply in a gown of one color and goes barefoot inside and out. When Lane’s Yankee woman, based on her mother, visits Molly’s house, her hostess first yells at the dogs and then proclaims: “‘I’m right proud to see you all,’ she said, looking at mother’s calico dress. ‘We-all ain’t fine like Northerners, but sech as we got is good enough for us-uns. Light ’n’ come in.”³ Just like the people of the piney woods, our poorer Appalachian neighbors let us know that they were unimpressed by northerners, and they referred to us collectively as “furriners.” Since people from the northern United States were just as foreign as people from Egypt or Italy or even Louisville, we formed our own community of outsiders.

Wilder, on the other hand, was all alone and found the situation isolating and ultimately threatening. The fact that she stood out as not fitting into that time and place was something that her Florida relatives never forgot. As late as the 1970s, Peter and Mary Ingalls’s youngest daughter, Emma, told a story handed down in the family that underscored Wilder’s separateness. Laura, she recalled with amusement, had been helping Peter plant corn, “holding a big, black umbrella to shield herself from the hot Florida sun.” She had trouble balancing the umbrella and planting corn at the same time, and “in exasperation, Peter ordered her to the house.”⁴ The story is not told with any empathy for Wilder; instead, it emphasizes not only failure to fit in but also implies a general foolishness on her part. In the end, neither the climate nor the culture suited the Wilders, and the family headed back to De Smet in August 1892, less than a year after they arrived in the piney woods.

Like so many places, Westville, Florida, never lived up to its promoters’ promises. Peter and Mary Ingalls proved up on their homestead and raised their family near what is today a small town with a population between 253 and 261. When I Googled Westville to find out more about it, the most prominent item on websites was that Laura Ingalls Wilder had once lived there.⁵ It seems ironic that Wilder, who had disliked the place intensely, became its abiding distinction.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. William T. Anderson, ed., A Little House Sampler, by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 40–41; Alene M. Warnock, Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Westville Florida Years (Mansfield, Mo.: Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Assoc., 1979), pp. 7–8.
2. Wilder, “Autobiographical Sketch,” in Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds., The Junior Book of Authors, 2d ed., rev. (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1951), p. 300.
3. Lane, “Innocence,” in Little House Sampler, ed. Anderson, pp. 47–48.
4. Warnock, Laura Ingalls Wilder, p. 8.
5. “Discover Westville, FL,” unexploredflorida.com/destinations/westville/; “Westville, Florida,” Wikipedia. enwikipedia.org.