Why didn't Charles ever build a bigger house?

He was perverted. He wanted the children to hear.

They lived in a shed

Funny R1. You're right though. Everyone had a better house than the Ingalls.

In real life he was a bit of a deadbeat.

Charles spent all his free money on whores.

I hated how that buck toothed half pint was so possessive of Pa.

He had to spend all his spare cash getting his hair styled in Mankato

It was bad enough that he forced poor Carey to be the new half pint but then to saddle her with that weepy Sarah Cooper in the loft was just too much.

He was bigger where it mattered

Something I never understood was why the affluent Olsen's NEVER had a maid. Labor like that was CHEAP in the 1870's and 1880's.

Because, OP, the Ingalls were Congregational Protestants. Their home was for sleeping, eating, and praying, and for washing up on Saturday night in preparation for the Sabbath. There was not need for excess.

/no need...

Yeah. Me and Albert always had to find some out of the way spot to fuck.

They could have added a nice conservatory and indoor bathroom complete with power shower and bidet

This thread has me dying laughing. But really, it’s easier to heat a small home.

But, we summer in Walnut Heights.

I never saw this show.

They kept the soddie. Why didn't they stockpile their collection of orphans there?

That outdoor shed they lived in would've gone up like a tinder box I'd it was hit by a match.

Did Pa buy it or build it?

Everything was fine in Olsenville until that man who smelled like a horse and his uppity wife trying to see us brown eggs arrived in town and tried to become the moral center of the community. Everybody from Miss Beedle to Mrs. Whipple to Mr. Hanssen to Doc Baker to Reverand Alden and beyond knew where society in our quaint town was.

At the very least he could have built them a menstrual hut.

R21 = Eliza Jane

Now you mention it, how did women stem their flow back then?

Poor Charles, he certainly did not have any Tasteful Friends

R8's picture made me laugh out loud.

"Big House on the Prairie" - Yeah. Oooooookay, OP. Oooooookaaaaaay.

That's such a classic Guardian story. The Guardian is the Debbie Downer of newspapers.

R23 Here's a clue: there's a reason it's called being "on the rag."

r13

That is what the ice house was for.

R27 Only when writing about white people culture.

He really knew how to plow a field, if you catch my drift.

Well, this Charles wasn't in charge.

He should have been a rapist like Scott Baio. Apparently rapists live in bigger houses where people where brightly colored acrylic sweaters.

In real life Charles Ingalls was always on the move to avoid creditors. The books make this clear because in almost everyone theyt're in a different state, with no explanation of why they left the last town. He also had enormous wanderlust so that even when creditors were not after him he would pull up the whole family and move to a different state.

r32

Except that charge against Baio was a lie.

Just the one, r34?

I always wondered that. They did have an episode where they were building an extension to the kitchen or back maybe, and Pa got a better job out of town and hired a hot handyman to finish. They never tried to add on bedrooms or living spaces though. No way all those people could fit in that house, especially when they started adding all those kids.

Because they didn’t want to change the title of the show.

They were dirt poor OP. Remember Charles slaving a way at the mill. And the title of the show was Little House, not Medium, not Large and not McMansion.

Why the fuq did their house look like a 1980s tract home??? This always drove me crazy!!! And why the fuq wouldn't Charles put wood and walls around his daughters' bedroom so they don't hear Pa banging Ma every night, downstairs!!!! I mean for fuq's sake you worked in a SAW MILL!!!!! Scrap wood EVERYWHERE!!!!!

[quote] Something I never understood was why the affluent Olsen's NEVER had a maid. Labor like that was CHEAP in the 1870's and 1880's.

Because they would have had to bring her in from somewhere else and provide a living space for her. The proud farmers of the area would not have allowed their wives or daughters to work as a maid.

Also, they were better off than everyone else but not that much. If the crops failed they would be in as bad shape as everyone else, since the farmers wouldn't be able to pay their bills. Remember, when the Grange and the Railroad were fighting and everyone moved to Winoka, the Olsens were in as bad a shape as everyone else. Harriet had to become a saloon girl, just to send Nellie and Willie to a fancy school.

Mary describes that shack as the best house they ever had. Apparently it was an upgrade.

R33, lol I never read the books, that's great info. Even on the show, they make Mrs. Oleson a villain because Charles and even Jonathan want to continuously buy on credit before settling their previous debts. She's right of course, she has to pay for the goods.

It's true about the house, it would burn up in seconds with all the wood. The Garveys, Edwards, and Almanzo all had much better houses than the Ingalls. They could've upgraded the home a bit without losing the essence of the 'little house.' Carrie practically shared a room with ma and pa, how did they have sex in that shoebox?

[quote] [R33], lol I never read the books, that's great info. Even on the show, they make Mrs. Oleson a villain because Charles and even Jonathan want to continuously buy on credit before settling their previous debts. She's right of course, she has to pay for the goods.

She was the villain because she was a mean, vindictive, nasty, shrill busybody. She mean and nasty to her own husband. What was he trying to get from her on credit?

R43 That is what people used to do. If you ever go to Dollywood you can see the replica of her childhood home, which makes the "Little House" look good. With 10 children living in that small cabin and sleeping in the same room as the parents, they had to have seen their parents having sex.

All that paperwork and zoning issues — believe me I’ve been through it. So much craze, so much nut, so much kook.

R44, yes, she was mean, but in some instances like continuously extending credit, she was 100% right. There were a bunch of episodes where she shut him down for more credit. One ep he owed a lot and was waiting to get paid to settle up with the mercantile. However, the client couldn't pay the mill, thus Charles didn't get paid. So the whole family had to take jobs to pay off debts.

The show always glorified the Ingalls for obvious reasons. Like Charles was the town savior when everyone else failed. Nellie was a horror, but I found Laura much worse.

As I got older I began to sense what a creepy guy Michael Landon was, and just seeing him made me uncomfortable. He seemed like a very troubled guy and apparently was a huge drinker and chain smoker for decades. He was very handsome, but struck me as a real Mel Gibson type and wife-beater.

R48 he was Jewish, so I don’t think he was a Mel Gibson type. Yes his mother wasn’t Jewish but his father was, he had a Bar Mitzvah, and was known to speak Yiddish, so I think he considered himself a Jew. Also, I haven’t heard of any of his three wives saying he was physically abusive.

I agree that Laura was much more insufferable than Nellie.

And for those of you asking, whenever Pa wanted to give Ma a poke in the whiskers he took her out to the barn. They only did hand stuff in the bed. Whenever Ma climaxed Pa darted to cover the noise.

*farted!

With the character of Carrie being paper thin and taking just a little bit more space and air time than a ghost, why would you need a larger house?

With the right architect every house can accommodate ten people.

In the books, they only lived in that little claim shanty part-time after their first year or two on the prairie. They moved to town when it got cold and stayed there until late spring. Eventually, they abandoned the claim shanty (and their claim) to live full-time in town.

Why they decided to keep the Ingalls family in that little shack for the whole show is unknown, but I'm guessing it had to do with money. Why build and decorate more sets if you don't have to? Then there was the fact that they got a lot of mileage out of Laura and Mary being "country girls" in contrast with mean town girl Nellie. Perhaps they wanted to keep that distinction sharp. In the books, Nellie only plays a significant role for a very short while.

Why didn't they move to the suburb of Walnut Grove Heights?

Dean Bulter has the house in storage - after the show wrapped, it seemed nobody (not even Landon) wanted the house.

In the last episode the entire town was blown up (which is what Landon wanted) but the house remained intact., Surprisingly after the crew cleaned up the debris and cleared out, the house was left standing.

So Dean drove down, took down the house, put it in his truck drove away.

Due to legal wrangling, the house cannot be reassembled for public display (the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum) inquired about reconstructing the house.

But Fred Friendly has trade-marked the house, and Universal Studio bought the Friendly copyright on his Little House merchandise. So far Universal has no interest in allowing the house to be reconstructed,

R56 That is stupid. The show still makes them a huge amount of money and the house would serve to advertise the show.

"Something I never understood was why the affluent Olsen's NEVER had a maid."

I expect they were always between maids. And yes, girls did go work as maids in small towns and farming communities in the Old West, it was a way for them to earn a bit of money, or to support parents or siblings who were living in poverty, or just get the hell out of their parents' shack where she had to share a bed with five other sisters.

As to why Charles didn't build onto the house, well, apparently this was a common source of friction between husbands and wives in the Old West. The husband would be out all day, logging or farming or working for someone else, and he'd come back to be fed and sleep, he didn't care what the house was like. The wife would be stuck in a shack or dugout all day, and would beg and beg the husband to make a decent home for her and the kids, and the husband would be tired from farming and logging all day and didn't want to take on a huge new task, one that wouldn't benefit him or bring in any additional income. And believe me the last was a major consideration, if you were living in poverty and without birth control, the man of the family had damn well think about whether building a new cowshed or a new bedroom was more likely to keep his family fed through the winter.

[quote] And yes, girls did go work as maids in small towns and farming communities in the Old West, it was a way for them to earn a bit of money, or to support parents or siblings who were living in poverty, or just get the hell out of their parents' shack where she had to share a bed with five other sisters.

Yes, in real life, but could you have seen Charles Ingalls or any of the other men on the show allowing their daughter to go to work as the Olsen's maid? They would have rather they all starved.

Charles could have built a bigger house, but he liked Highgrove just As it was. He didn’t want to palace he wanted a family home.

I don't think Charles would've let his wife work as a maid. He had a fit in the show when Caroline went to work as a cook at Oleson's restaurant. When they were desperate, like when they moved and when they had debts to pay, he did allow the whole family to work.

"Yes, in real life, but could you have seen Charles Ingalls or any of the other men on the show allowing their daughter to go to work as the Olsen's maid? "

Uh, the "Little House" TV show was heavily idealized. In real life, there would be some family in town whose paterfamilias had taken off or died or who was just drinking away his income, and the kids would be out looking for any work they could get from age eight or so. Or some girl would talk her parents into letting her take the job as she thought she'd catch a better class of husband as part of the "rich" household, or maybe because she hoped to eat meat that came from a domesticated animal.

There was a lot of serious poverty in the Old West, big families would live in one room and hope they had enough food to avoid starving during the winters. There were no child labor laws and education being age 12 or so was considered a luxury, kids were put to work from the moment they could walk, and were expected to contribute to the family with labor on the homestead or earning money elsewhere from very early ages. So really, if the Olsons didn't have a maid, it was because the show wanted to keep the number of recurring characters down, not because nobody in town was interested in having fewer mouths to feed.

The real Ingalls did not adopt orphans, they barely had enough resources for themselves. Charles was actually a hard worker, either through bad choices or bad luck, he remained poor. Caroline came from a comfortable middle-class background, she definitely "married down".

The Nellie Oleson character was a combination of three real girls that Laura disliked, she was jealous of all three of them for various reasons, that says more about Laura's personality than the supposed nastiness of "Nellie Oleson".

Laura adored her "Pa", she was close to her younger sister Carrie, but, she seemed somewhat indifferent to her mother & her other sisters, there's a rumor that Laura did not attend her mother's funeral.

In the books, there was much consternation about one of the girls working (as a maid?) in the hotel in town, and Pa wouldn’t allow it. One of them did some sewing, which paid less but was “respectable”. It’s been 40 years since I read that, so I could be wrong.

I also remember Laura making friends with some poor girl while they were washing dishes after a church supper. The girl had been “adopted” by this Good Christian family and I had the distinct impression that she was nothing but unpaid labor (and then some, if you catch my drift) and the family exploited her nonstop.

Things sucked back in the day, for women and children. And probably for gays, too.

I truly believe that our beloved Phoebe Tyler Wallingford was somehow a direct descendant of Harriett Olsen. Maybe just 1/10 of her was not of the daughters of fine lineage, but Phoebe and Harriett had so much in common.....

R64, that was touched upon in the show. Every orphan that Charles was entrusted to place, running theme, was wanted for labor. Yeah, on the show Mary did sewing.

In real life, Laura went to work as a seamstress.

They had Mary taking in sewing? Bitch was blind!

Mary was much prettier than fugly Laura, did they have different parents?

I never understood how they changed massive amounts from the books like taking in orphans every year, Laura's husband was actually very sickly etc.. but still made Mary go blind. Not only that, but she dumped after being cheated on by her fiancée, she almost died a couple of times, she had a miscarriage, lost her baby in the fire, her husband got his sight back and felt she was a burden to him etc.. she was the show's punching bag.

She had the sewing job before she went blind. Lol

Did Willy and Albert spy on Blind Mary soaping her tits up?

No, they were busy sucking each other off.

This thread has me laughing my head off, and looking up the books online.

Ida Brown was the sweet girl who was adopted by Reverend Brown and his family. Many of Ida’s family had perished in the big Chicago Fire, and the Browns took her in. I’m betting a million dollars I don’t have that the good Reverend was diddling her. Some things never change.

I remember Charles' father came to live with them for a while and he was going to add on an extra room for him. He left to go back to Wisconsin and die, however, and Charles scrapped those plans.

"The girl had been “adopted” by this Good Christian family and I had the distinct impression that she was nothing but unpaid labor (and then some, if you catch my drift) and the family exploited her nonstop. "

Well, that's how adoption generally went in those days. If an ordinary family took in an "orphant", it was to be an unpaid servant rather than to add a new member to the family, it was how the skint middle class and working class got servants, they took in children and paid them nothing but their keep. The orphans took the deal because it was a marginally better existence than living in the institutions of the day.

Of course it was a bit different for the upper class and prosperous middle class, orphans with an inheritance became "wards". They lived with relatives or guardians, and hopefully had an inheritance left when they grew up and left the nest. But orphans with no money to get anyone interested were out on the street, put in horrible public orphanages where they faced all kinds of abuse, or were "adopted" by people who wanted free labor.

I read a memoir by a woman who'd grown up on the frontier, in the last days of the Old West. Her family went to join her grandfather who was growing corn on the prairie, and living in a "sod hut", that is, a hole in the ground with a roof over it. When the snow was heavy the door couldn't be opened, and five people were stuck in a hole in the ground for days. They couldn't add onto the house without digging more hole and taking a trip to the mountains a day's wagon trip away to cut timber, because they lived in a treeless area. Her family had been middle class and her parents and grandfather were educated, but there was only one book in the house, a dime novel, and there was no money with which to buy more books. The only education she had was her grandfather using that book as a way to introduce talks about history, geography, geology, mathematics, grammar, etc.

Some of you have NO idea what kind of grinding poverty existed in those days, or how it affected every aspect of life and human relationships.

In real life Laura did work as a hotel maid and a seamstress before she got a teaching certificate. When the family lived in Burr Oak , IA a lady offered to buy Laura because she needed help around the house. I have my suspicions about why a strange lady wanted the prettiest Ingalls daughter to come work for her.

R76 if she was the prettiest then why did they hire such an ugly girl to play her?

Real life Half Pint was prettier than Melissa Gilbert.

In real life they lived in a mound-shaped hut that was covered with sod for a few dank winters, like the Norwegian peasants they were descended from.

Somehow on the show Pa was never able to raise their standard of living, Laura married Almonzo and wound up in a perfectly nice house with finished floors and walls, yet Pa and Ma still lived in the wood lean-to.

Fuck you bitch! My ancestors arrived on the Mayflower!

[quote]Real life Half Pint was prettier than Melissa Gilbert.

Half Pint? More like a full gallon.

R80 Also has Delano family name. Laura Ingalls Wilder was 5th cousin once removed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

That's funny because Rose Wilder Lane was a libertarian loon who hated Roosevelt and called for his assassination.

In real life, Ma, Mary, Carrie, and Grace were all plain as a mud fence. Laura was pretty. Almanzo was HOT. Pa looked like hipsters do now.

Almanzo, smoldering at the camera. STUD.

Laura must have had a hot pussy! Here's Cap Garland who was one of her suitors.

Can't believe I screwed up the link here's the right one.

what I love is how now effort was made to the scrubby and thorny California desert landscape to make it look like the fertile Minnesota prairie.

*NO effort, not now

He already has Clarence House and will one day in Buckingham Palace, why does he need a bigger house?

The real Laura was quite an attractive older woman too.

Cane face

R75, I read that most households, if they had only one book, they had the Bible and taught their children from it. A second book might have been a dictionary, or maybe Pilgrim’s Progress, a really popular book that was an allegory in the form of a novel, to teach young people moral values. Maybe if they had a few bucks there was a book of hymns or prayer book. After that came everything else.

I wonder why that family had a dime store novel? It was probably a gift someone left behind.

R75, the woman who was educated with one dime novel never explained what it was doing there or why there was no bible in the house. Her family later moved to a town and she did well in school, and became a writer in later life, so her odd home-schooling seems to have done no harm. BTW she was living in a dugout house and being educated in one book in the early 1910s, when the rest of the world had huge passenger steamships and running water and telegraph news from the far side of the world.

The Old West as POOR, where many people lived at the primitive subsistence farming level, as the world made huge technological advances, and they weren't included in the resulting social changes. And still aren't, although by now it's deliberate in some ways.

they were zealous Protestants who believed in that kind of living, they wanted to be austere and horrible.

Their Catholic counterparts of the same period in Boston probably had polished marble floors and wrought-iron gates.

The whole thing sounds miserable.

Little was a great wholesome family show.

Tasteful friends on the prairie.

R97, it really wasn't wholesome. Many of the episodes were terrifying.

Where did they use the toilet? Where did they wash each morning?

The main room is a older version of The Honeymooners apartment. Nowhere comfortable to sit, but I guess there was no time for that.

[quote]Now you mention it, how did women stem their flow back then?

Gingham.

Upturned Sunbonnets for those heavy days.

Were stairs out-of-reach technology? Why not build some stairs to the loft - even if small - next to the wall?

[quote] [R97], it really wasn't wholesome. Many of the episodes were terrifying.

You found the child killed in the sudden blizzard, the rape episode and the morphine addiction episodes terrifying, really?