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Rocky Ridge Farm
In 1894, the hard-pressed young couple moved a final time to Mansfield, Missouri, making a partial down payment on a piece of undeveloped property just outside town that they named Rocky Ridge Farm. What began as about 40 acres (0.2 kmē) of thickly wooded, stone covered hillside with a windowless log cabin, over the next 20 years, evolved into a 200 acre (0.8 kmē), relatively prosperous, poultry, dairy and fruit farm. The ramshackle log cabin was eventually replaced with an impressive and unique ten-room farmhouse and outbuildings.
The couple's climb to financial security was a slow and halting process. Initially, the only income the farm produced was from wagonloads of firewood Almanzo sold for fifty cents in town, the result of the backbreaking work of clearing the trees and stones from land that slowly evolved into fertile fields and pastures. The apple trees would not begin to bear fruit for seven years. Barely able to eke out a more than a subsistence living on the new farm, the Wilders decided to move into nearby Mansfield in the late 1890s. Almanzo found work as an oil salesman and general delivery man, while Laura took in boarders and served meals to local railroad workers. Any spare time was spent improving the farm and planning for a better future.
Rose Wilder Lane grew into an intelligent, restless young woman who was not satisfied with the rural lifestyle her parents loved. She later described her unhappiness and isolation at the Mansfield school, attributing it to a combination of her family's poverty and her reputation as an outstanding scholar. By the time she was sixteen, dissatisfaction with the limited curriculum available in Mansfield resulted in Rose being sent to spend a year with her aunt, Eliza Jane Wilder, in Crowley, Louisiana, to attend a more advanced high school there. She graduated with distinction in 1904 and soon returned to Mansfield.
The Wilders' financial situation, while somewhat improved by this time, still placed higher education out of the question for Rose. Taking matters into her own hands, Rose learned telegraphy at the Mansfield depot and soon departed Mansfield for Kansas City, where she landed a job with Western Union as a telegraph operator. In 1904, it was uncommon for a seventeen-year-old girl to leave home to work for a living, but her parents recognized that their daughter was not cut out for the typical options that life offered to girls who remained in Mansfield: housewife or spinster. A remarkable transformation occurred in the ensuing years, and Rose Wilder Lane became a well-known, if not quite famous, literary figure of her day. She was the most famous person to hail from Mansfield, Missouri, until Laura Ingalls Wilder began to publish her "Little House" Books in the 1930s and 1940s.
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