What Happened on the Last Episode of ‘Little House on the Prairie’?
Little House on the Prairie aired regular episodes from 1974 to 1983, but the story of the Ingalls family and Walnut Grove didn’t end there. While the final episode of the series, season nine’s “Hello and Goodbye,” aired on March 21, 1983, a set of three made-for-TV movies followed in late 1983 and early 1984 — Little House: Look Back to Yesterday and Little House: Bless All the Dear Children, both of which aired in December 1983, and Little House: The Last Farewell, which aired 41 years ago this week, on February 6, 1984. You may recall that The Last Farewell, famously one of the most shocking finales of all time, ended the show with a literal bang — but what else do you remember about the final episode?
Why Walnut Grove got blown to smithereens
“Hello and Goodbye,” which ended season nine, wasn’t a proper farewell episode that resolved lingering plotlines — in fact, the episode even introduced a new character, British expat Sherwood Montague. This is because season nine wasn’t planned as the final season for Little House. Rather, as Melissa Gilbert, who starred as Laura, recently told Entertainment Weekly, after season nine, “We just weren’t on the fall schedule.” The show’s ratings had been dropping — after years in the top 20, season nine saw the show fall to #29 — but still, it was a shock to quietly get the ax without even a heads up from the network.
Little House creator, director, writer and star Michael Landon wasn’t pleased that the show was given such an unceremonious send-off after decades at NBC (the channel had also aired his previous series, Bonanza). According to Gilbert, this is why the series famously ends with the people of Walnut Grove destroying their own town: “I knew that he wanted to demolish everything because he was so angry that NBC never called him to tell him the show was officially canceled.”
But it wasn’t really about spite; according to Gilbert, the decision to demolish the sets was done out of “[Landon’s] desire to not have anyone else use our sets — like to have some porn out there shooting [on old Little House sets]. Those were ours. We built them. I mean, I had so many major life experiences in and around all of those buildings, as did everyone on the cast and crew. That place was sacred to us in a big way.”
What Happened on the Final Episode?
NBC / Courtesy: Everett Collection
At the start of Little House: The Last Farewell, Ma and Pa Ingalls return to Walnut Grove. They passed their homestead on to John and Sarah Carter in season nine and moved on to Burr Oak, Iowa, but with the Carters traveling out of town, they’re able to stay in their old home, and catch up with their former neighbors.
However, things aren’t peaceful for long: real estate baron Nathan Lassiter has laid claim to all the land in Hero Township, including Walnut Grove. The people of Walnut Grove had believed the area to be homesteading country, but the court, and then some army soldiers, side with Lassiter.
So the townsfolk make a tough choice: they decide to dynamite the entirety of Walnut Grove, rather than let Lassiter claim it. Much as Landon did when he wrote the script demolishing the town, the denizens of Walnut Grove decided they wanted to destroy the thing they’d helped create, rather than allow it to fall into the hands of someone who didn’t care about it.
The destruction begins with Laura, Almanzo, Rose and their boarders standing outside the boarding house. Almanzo, who has laid down the dynamite, sweats nervously, and Laura grimaces. But silently, they accept what has to be done; Almanzo pushes down the plunger on the dynamite, and the house explodes in a cloud of dust.
In a wordless sequence, the rest of the Grovers gather to do the same, walking to the center of town trailing wires from their own dynamite rigs. Together, in front of the wagons they’ll ride to their new lives, the men remove their hats, and Reverend Alden leads them in a prayer: “Dear Lord, we bury a friend today. This town has been our friend. Its made us a family. Its kept us together. Wherever we go in this world, we will always remember Walnut Grove. It will always be home to us.”
NBC / Courtesy: Everett Collection
Prayer completed, Mr. Edwards, weeping, connects the wires of his dynamite to his plunger and blows up his home. One by one, each building follows suit (though the Little House still stands). According to Gilbert, the tears you see on-screen were real, and constant: “And the thing [was] we’d all be okay for a few minutes, and then someone would start crying and then everyone would start crying. And it wasn’t just us on camera, it was the crew behind the camera, too. They were standing in this rubble and they saw it blow up the day before, or a couple days before. But that was our last day together.”
Rev. Alden walks through the destroyed remains of Walnut Grove to the church, and rings the church bell for the last time.
Lassiter, his men, and the law arrive soon after, and are immediately shocked by the destruction (to quote Lassiter: “What the hell!”). Lassiter tries to get every resident arrested, but the colonel he’s brought with him doesn’t believe that the people have committed any crime. The town, Mr. Edwards proclaims, was “our town. You might own all of this land, but what was on it is ours. To do with what we saw fit.” Residents from nearby towns tell Lassiter that if he tries to take over their town, they’ll do the exact same thing. Rev. Alden proclaims that “Walnut Grove did not die in vain;” the people cheer and sing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and ride their wagons out of town, into a new life where, once again, they’ll build from scratch.
Why was the Little House spared when almost everything else ended up in splinters? According to Gilbert, “I think the [house] itself was sort of this symbol of hope for the Ingalls family and continued to stand as a sort of symbol of hope for everybody else. Though we are leaving, we can always rebuild, which is what the Ingalls family always did.”
Little House on the Prairie: The Last Farewell is streaming on Amazon Prime.
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