In the final chapter of These Happy Golden Years, titled “Little Gray Home in the West” (pp. 279–89), Wilder recounts Laura’s first tour of the house she and Almanzo shared after their marriage in 1885. It’s a loving portrayal, full of detail, but I had never thought much about it until a couple of years ago, when a young boy named Walter Penner wrote the South Dakota Historical Preservation Office to ask if anyone had ever drawn a plan of the inside of “the little gray house that Almanzo Wilder built.”1 It appears that nobody ever had, and the house itself had burned to the ground in 1889, but I kept thinking that it shouldn’t be that difficult to do. Wilder had described the house again in The First Four Years (pp. 10–14). Surely, a floor plan could be drawn from her remarkably detailed descriptions. So, earlier this year I finally put the idea to the test, asking my daughter Kristen Koupal Venner, who is a landscape designer, if she would take a stab at drawing a simple floor plan.
Courtesy Kristen Koupal Venner
The idea appealed to Kristen, but we quickly learned that it would be harder than we thought. For one thing, there were no measurements. Wilder describes the doors, windows, pantry, great room, bedroom, cellar, and lean-to, but we were on our own figuring out if the house was square and wide or long and narrow. We knew roughly where the doors and windows were, but not if they opened in or out. Their size was also unspecified. But the more we studied Wilder’s descriptions, the more we realized that the house was similar to the Surveyors’ House in De Smet. The little gray house contained a great room that functioned as living room and dining room, with a lean-to, just like the Surveyors’ House. More to the point, it also featured an elaborate pantry that Almanzo had crafted for his new bride and which reminded me of the pantry in By the Shores of Silver Lake (pp. 140, 144). As a result, we reasoned that the little gray house was similar in scale and design to the main floor of the Surveyors’ House, but since Almanzo’s dwelling lacked a staircase, our plan could allow a little more room for both the bedroom and the pantry.
Courtesy Kristen Koupal Venner
Mary Jo Wertz, the director of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in De Smet, supplied the dimensions of the main floor of the older building, roughly 30 feet wide by 16 feet long, and Kristen began to draw.2 We looked up the standard size of doors and windows in the 1880s and opened most of the doors out, judging that it allowed the bedroom and pantry to feel more spacious. With such guesses and assumptions, Kristen created a basic plan that accommodated the features of the house as Wilder outlined them in her novels. In a second sketch, Kristen added the furnishings such as chairs, a stove, a bed, a table, and pantry elements, again using estimates of their size and approximations of their placements. I share her designs with the caveat that these drawings are only as good as our assumptions and estimates and Wilder’s memories of her first house.3 That said, this mother/daughter project afforded us a lot of pleasure as we explored the little gray house that Almanzo built.
―Nancy Tystad Koupal
- Walter [Penner] to South Dakota State Historical Society, [Feb. 24, 2024], South Dakota State Archives, Pierre.
- Telephone conversation with Mary Jo Wertz, director of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, De Smet, S.Dak., 29 Apr. 2026. To be precise, the main floor of the Surveyors’ House measures 30 feet, 6 inches wide, but we decided to use round numbers in the floor plan.
- These sketches are based solely on Wilder’s descriptions cited above, which do not adequately explain the kitchen. By 1889, possibly through renovation, the little gray house had acquired an enclosed kitchen, which is where the fire started in The First Four Years (p. 128). I think, however, that the lean-to with Almanzo’s bachelor stove, pots, and pans functioned as the Wilder kitchen, especially during the summer.