What Happened to the Little House From ‘Little House on the Prairie’?
On Little House on the Prairie‘s famous final episode, the people of Walnut Grove decide to destroy their town rather than hand it over to a money-hungry businessman. The townsfolk blow up nearly every building — except the church and the Little House itself, which still stands on the edge of town long after the businesses and the Wilders’ boarding house have been blown to smithereens. Famously, series star and creator Michael Landon destroyed the sets so that they couldn’t be used to shoot future shows or films that didn’t meet Little House‘s standards. But according to a recent interview in Entertainment Weekly with star Melissa Gilbert, the Little House wasn’t just spared symbolically — it’s actually still around, in the home of one of the show’s former stars.
Gilbert described Little House‘s sets as “sacred,” and called the experience of filming the final episode “gutting,” recalling, “For me personally, that whole experience from reading the script [of the final episode] until the last day was the longest funeral I’d ever attended.”
But the Little House itself was spared, however, because “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.”
It was such a symbol of hope, said Gilbert, that Stan Ivar — who joined the cast in its final season as John Carter — actually “disassembled it piece by piece and has had it in storage forever.” According to Gilbert, attempts to donate it to the Smithsonian or similar cultural institutions haven’t worked out: “We’ve tried to give it to so many places and nobody wants it. I’m not sure why.”
Everett Collection
Gilbert’s comments echo a 2020 Entertainment Weekly article, which noted that Ivar “asked if he could keep the set. Landon agreed, so Ivar took the [disassembled] keepsake to his home in rural Los Angeles County, and entertained grandiose plans to rebuild and relocate the abode someday for fans to visit and enjoy.”
This article also noted more failed attempts to place the Little House with a cultural institution, mentioning an effort to donate it to Walnut Grove’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, a plan that “had the support of then-governor Jesse Ventura — but Ed Friendly allegedly nixed the idea.”
Why is giving away one of the most famous sets from one of the most popular TV shows of all time so darn hard? Trip Friendly, son of cocreator Ed Friendly, shed a little light on why that might be in the same article: “‘I’m not familiar with [Ivar having the house],’ says Trip Friendly, who was in boarding school and college when the original series was in production. ‘It would have been the property of NBC, and so it would have been up to them to decide what to do [with it].'” So perhaps the Little House has not found a permanent second home for a very TV reason: rights issues.
Due to all of this, the Little House remains in the California backyard of Ivar, who is now 82. While fans would obviously prefer a Little House that could be visited (imagine the selfies!), it’s good to know that it evaded the greedy grasp of Nathan Lassiter and ended up in the hands of a kind-hearted blacksmith, who will protect it from evildoers (and kept it from getting turned into an outhouse on a studio backlot, too).
Remind 
1974 (50 Years Ago)
January 2024
In this time capsule issue of ReMIND Magazine we look back 50 years ago to 1974!
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