Laura and Mary Ingalls Dolls

Unlike other dolls among our collections,
the Little House dolls are based upon real life
characters. Laura's hair was brown just like her
Pa's hair and whiskers. (Laura Ingalls Doll
by Joan Ibarolle.)

Laura Elizabeth Ingalls (Wilder was her married name) 1867-1957 was born to Charles Phillip and Caroline Lake (née Quiner) Ingalls on February 7, 1867. At the time of Ingalls' birth, the family lived seven miles north of the village of Pepin, Wisconsin in the Big Woods region of Wisconsin. Ingalls' home in Pepin became the setting for her first book, Little House in the Big Woods. She was the second of five children, following older sister, Mary Amelia. Three more children would follow, Caroline Celestia (Carrie), Charles Frederick, who died in infancy, and Grace Pearl. Laura's birth site is commemorated by a replica log cabin at the Little House Wayside in Pepin. Her life in Pepin formed the basis for her first book, Little House in the Big Woods (1932).

Laura's father was a descendant of the Delano family, the ancestral family of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and she was also a third cousin, once removed, of President Ulysses S. Grant.

When she was two years old, Laura moved with her family from Wisconsin in 1869. After stopping in Rothville, Missouri, they settled in the Indian country of Kansas, near modern day Independence, Kansas. Her younger sister, Carrie, was born in Independence in August 1870, not long before they moved again. According to Ingalls Wilder, Ingalls' father had been told that the location would be open to white settlers, but when they arrived this was not the case. The Ingalls family had no legal right to occupy their homestead because it was on the Osage Indian reservation. They had just begun to farm when they heard rumors that settlers would be evicted, so they left in the spring of 1871. Although in her novel and Pioneer Girl memoirs Ingalls portrayed their departure as being prompted by rumors of eviction, she also noted that her parents needed to recover their Wisconsin land because the buyer had not paid the mortgage.

A portrait and profile view of our Nellie Oleson doll by Joan Ibarolle.
"Played by actress Alison Arngrim, Nellie Oleson was a manipulative,
witty, sharp-tongued character on the NBC television show, Little
House on the Prairie. Her parents, Nels and Harriet Oleson, owned
the mercantile in the small town of Walnut Grove, set in
post-Civil War Minnesota." Read more...

The Ingalls family went back to Wisconsin where they lived for the next three years. Those experiences formed the basis for Ingalls Wilder's novels Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and Little House on the Prairie (1935).

On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), the third volume of her fictionalized history which takes place around 1874, the Ingalls family moves from Kansas to an area near Walnut Grove, Minnesota, settling in a dugout on the banks of Plum Creek. They moved there from Wisconsin when Ingalls was about seven years old, after briefly living with the family of her uncle, Peter Ingalls, first in Wisconsin and then on rented land near Lake City, Minnesota. In Walnut Grove, the family first lived in a dugout sod house on a preemption claim; after wintering in it, they moved into a new house built on the same land. Two summers of ruined crops led them to move to Iowa. On the way, they stayed again with Charles Ingalls' brother, Peter Ingalls, this time on his farm near South Troy, Minnesota. Her brother, Charles Frederick Ingalls ("Freddie"), was born there on November 1, 1875, dying nine months later in August 1876. In Burr Oak, Iowa, the family helped run a hotel. The youngest of the Ingalls children, Grace, was born there on May 23, 1877.

Mary, Laura's older sister became blind at 14
because of a childhood illness. She never
married in real life and she lived with her sisters
until 1928 when she died of pneumonia.

The family moved from Burr Oak back to Walnut Grove where Charles Ingalls served as the town butcher and justice of the peace. He accepted a railroad job in the spring of 1879, which took him to eastern Dakota Territory, where they joined him that fall. Ingalls Wilder omitted the period in 1876–1877 when they lived near Burr Oak, skipping to Dakota Territory, portrayed in By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939). Wikipedia

Mary Amelia Ingalls (1865-1928) At the age of 14, Ingalls suffered an illness—thought to be scarlet fever—at the time believed to have caused her to lose her eyesight. A 2013 study published in the journal Pediatrics, concluded it was actually viral meningoencephalitis that caused Ingalls' blindness, based on evidence from first-hand accounts and newspaper reports of her illness as well as relevant school registries and epidemiologic data on blindness and infectious diseases. Between 1881 and 1889, Ingalls attended the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton, Iowa.

The historical record is silent as to why Mary did not attend school during one year in that period, but she did finish the seven-year course of study in 1889 and graduated. She then returned home to De Smet, South Dakota, living with her parents. Mary contributed to the family income by making fly nets for horses. After her father died in 1902, she and her mother rented out a room in their home for extra income. Following her mother's death in April 1924, Mary lived for a time with her sister, Grace Ingalls Dow in Manchester, South Dakota.

After that, Mary traveled to Keystone, South Dakota, to live with her sister Carrie Ingalls Swanzey. It was there that she suffered from a stroke. She died not long after as a result of pneumonia on October 20, 1928, at the age of 63. Her body was returned to De Smet, where she was buried in the Ingalls family plot next to her parents at De Smet Cemetery.