The Ingalls family lived and worked in this hotel for about a year
Burr Oak House - Masters Hotel, Burr Oak Iowa
The Burr Oak House/Masters Hotel is the only known extant structure occupied by Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the "Little House" books, and her family during their sojourn in Iowa from 1876 to 1878. Although she did not describe Burr Oak in her published works, the time she spent here, says her biographer Donald Zochert, was for her "a crossroads of the spirit. It was the place where gently and and imperceptibly she crossed the line between childhood and adolescence, and where she saw in the hardest times the possibilities that life held for her." Also, she found in the Burr Oak School "a teacher who introduced her for the first time to the real magic of language, to the rhythms and turns of good literature."
Small hotels like the Burr Oak House/Masters Hotel were once relatively common along the wagon roads that pioneers followed during the settlement era in Iowa. The origins of this particular hotel can be traced back to 1851 when Samuel Belding and his half-brother Wheeler built a log hotel north of the present structure. The Wheelers eventually sold it to John Waggoner who operated it as the "Waggoner House." Waggoner eventually sold it but repurchased it in 1857. By this time the hotel had been enlarged several times, the log portion torn down, and had been renamed the "Burr Oak House." The growth of the hotel was due to the fact that the road through Burr Oak was a major road for the emigrant trains coming from the river counties along the Mississippi in Minnesota and Wisconsin. At times, as many as 200-300 wagons passed through the town daily, and at night the hotels, houses, and even yards were filled with people.
In 1873 John Waggoner sold the hotel to William J. Masters, and it became known as the "Masters Hotel." By this time, the flow of settlers through Burr Oak had greatly decreased, and business for the village's two hotels was slack. Three years later, Masters sold the hotel to William Steadman. Steadman had known Charles Ingalls and his family in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and he invited the Ingalls family to come to Burr Oak and help him and his family run the hotel.
Charles Ingalls, his wife Caroline, and daughters Mary, Laura, and Carrie arrived in Burr Oak early in the fall of 1876 and moved into the hotel. That the hotel business was slow was evidenced by the fact that Charles Ingalls soon began operating a grinding mill in partnership with a local man. By early 1877 the Steadmans began to talk about selling the hotel, and Charles Ingalls decided to move his family into rooms above a grocery store next door. A few months later, the family moved again, this time to a brick house on the edge of town. It was here that Grace Ingalls was born on May 23, 1877. (Both the store and house have been demolished.) Although Laura Ingalls Wilder did not mention Burr Oak in the "Little House" Books, she did give the family's sojourn here considerable space in her unpublished memoir. Before writing the series, she wrote a novel entitled Pioneer Girl which included the stay in Burr Oak, but publishers rejected it. There appear to have been two reasons why Burr Oak was not mentioned in the "Little House" books. When the series was published, the publishers insisted on adding two years to Mary's and Laura's ages because they felt that the two could not possibly remember and do some of the things they did in Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. Another reason for the omission may have been the family's general unhappiness during this period. Prior to moving to Burr Oak, their wheat crop was devoured by grasshoppers, and while en route the infant Charles Frederick Ingalls died. While in Burr Oak, they seem to have had a hardscrabble existence, and some sources suggest that the family left town in the middle of the night to avoid payment of a debt. Laura Ingalls Wilder's biographer believes, however, that Burr Oak was an important turning point in her life, and that the people and experiences she encountered here played a major role in enabling her to write the eight books that comprise the highly successful "Little House" series.
Several months before the Ingalls family returned to Walnut Grove early in 1878, the Steadmans sold the hotel to William McLaughlin, who turned it into a dry goods and general store. In the early 1890s, T. P. Emmons bought the building as an office and residence for his son Dr. W. H. Emmons. Around 1896, F.C. Schank acquired the property, and he added a two-story addition to the south side shortly afterward and made it exclusively residential. In 1973 the building was purchased by Laura Ingalls Wilder Park, Inc., who restored and converted it into a museum.
Building Description
The Burr Oak House/Masters Hotel is a simple settlement-era vernacular edifice that shows the influence of the colonial styles with its saltbox roof and gable end windows in its upper half-story and the Greek Revival with its pilastered corner boards, plain boxed cornice, and frieze board. This one-and-a-half-story building is of wood frame construction; is sheathed in white-painted wooden clapboards; rests on concrete blocks over a raised full basement; and is capped with a salt-box roof that is pierced at its apex by a single central chimney stack. Windows are of the one-over-one, two-over-two, and six-over-six wood sash variety and are set in rectangular surrounds. Except for the turned and bracketed posts that support the front porch, exterior ornamentation on the building is minimal.
Inside, the hotel contains eleven rooms located on three levels. The full basement houses the kitchen and two dining rooms; the main floor features two bedrooms, a parlor, and a former saloon room which now serves as a gift shop; and the top floor consists of four bedrooms. During the recent restoration, all the original lath and plaster was replaced by sheetrock, but much of the original interior woodwork remains. The rooms now contain exhibits relating to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a number of antiques and other displays relating to local history.
The hotel as it appears today is the product of a restoration effort undertaken between 1973 and 1976 by area residents and fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder. By the time the house and acre of land around it were purchased in 1973, both were in terrible condition. The building was practically a shambles, and the area around it that contained the spring that furnished water for the hotel and the hill where Laura and her sisters had gone sledding, was overgrown and filled with junk. During the next three years the land was cleared and landscaped for a park, and the hotel extensively rehabilitated. A late 1890's addition to its south side was removed, and the exterior was restored on the basis of an early photograph to what it probably had looked like when the Ingalls family lived there. The crumbling limestone foundation was replaced with cement blocks which the museum intends to face with lime rock to assimilate its original appearance in the near future.
Northwest (1977)
