The other day as I tuned out from all the holiday festivities, I tuned into a rerun of Little House on the Prairie to catch some of the antics of that rascally Laura or glean some good old-fashioned wisdom from Pa.
One thing struck me as very strange. Maybe someone can sort this out.
The episode in question featured an older man named Toby whose equally older girlfriend broke up with because she was having commitment issues. In fact, I tuned in at exactly this point: the scene took place at her dinner table and there were various shots of her house. On the walls were several electric lamps, on the various coffee tables was artwork and other everyday chatchkes, and her house generally resembled a modern home.
Skip to the next scene which is in the Ingalls home and it seems the show jumps back a century in time. The Ingalls are still living in their manger-like house sharing living quarters with the animals and reading by candlelight.
I assume all parties came from Walnut Grove and had access to all the same resources. So what gives? Why is one home a model of modernity and the other a relic of biblical times?
Is this how things really were?
Well, from what I know from the books (and I used to watch the show all the time, too), electricity was available around that time period, but was generally used only in larger towns, and by the wealthy. The Ingalls lived way out in the countryside, and so wouldn’t have had access to electricity even if they had been able to afford it (which the couldn’t).
As for the everyday knicknacks, yeah, the show wasn’t always completely faithful to the time period, but then again, it wasn’t really all that long ago.
WAG - The first house was in a town/city. This covers a couple of things. Some towns may have been wired for electricity by then while the Ingalls’ farm house wouldn’t be yet. Also, those who lived in town tended to have more money - Inn Keepers, Tavern Owners, Doctors, Lawyers, etc. - than some guy working 40 acres with a plow.
Did she live in town? That might have something to do with it. Homes in more densely populated aresa probably would have gotten electricity sooner than a relatively isolated farm.(who’s going to pay for stringing of lots of wire to serve each customer?) And economic and class differences would have mattered then just as they do now.
Maybe what you thought were electric lights were really gas or oil lights. There were many different designs, some of them could have looked a lot like our modern electric lights.
The books took place around the 1880’s or so, give or take a decade or two.
1880s, I think.
If you look at the Olsen’s place, the rooms were much more modern. Nellie and Willy had their own rooms, guestrooms, etc etc. But the Ingalls lived on a farm in Walnut Grove, a very small prairie town. Some of the homes were more modern than others. (Like Nellie having more fancy dresses than Laura and Mary did.)
Actually, the Ingalls just had a log cabin.
Methinks I know too much about this. I loved these books as a kid, and still really like The Long Winter.
Yeah, it was around the 1880s. Laura was born in 1867. And actually, Guinastasia, the Ingalls lived in a log cabin in the Big Woods, but on the Prairie they lived in a house with plank walls covered in tar paper. So in that respect, the show was pretty faithful to the book.
By the 1880s, many municipalities had gas service. The first electrical generating plant was opened in 1882 in NYC by Thomas Edison. By 1900, electric servce was becoming more and more common in urban homes. By 1920, electric service was quite common, and had supplanted gas lighting in most municipalities. (From A Social History of American Technology by Ruth Schwartz Cowan.)
If Laura Ingalls was born in 1867, and the show ended when she was in her early 20s, then the latest year the show portrayed was probably 1890 or so.
It is quite unlikely that a house in rural Minnesota had electric lights by 1890. But I would also be surprised if a town like Walnut Grove (or even Mankato) had municipal gas service.
So, in all likelihood, the show producers were playing fast and loose with the details. But they weren’t all that far off. By 1890 or so, many houses were recognizably “modern,” with plastered painted walls, etc.
Perhaps this woman was supposed to be wealthy or “upper-class,” because ordinary farm people couldn’t afford tchotchkes or plaster or artworks. Maybe one theme of the episode was the class difference between Toby and the girlfriend. This theme was played out over and over on the show–but usually the focus was on the class differences between the Ingalls and the Olsens.
D’oh!
It’s just they never talked about the Big Woods on the show.
I remember getting that for my birthday one year from my mom-it was one of my favorite gifts.