Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the "Little House" books, was honored here after a life that began in a log cabin seven miles northwest of this place on February 7, 1867. In the 1870s her parents moved the family to Kansas Territory, then to Minnesota, and finally to South Dakota. At 15 she was teaching school, and three years later she married Almanzo Wilder. After living for a time in South Dakota, they settled on a farm near Mansfield, Missouri. Wilder began her writing career at age 65, and the first of her series of eight books, "Little House in the Big Woods," drew on her experiences in the Pepin area and became an immediate success. The "Little House" books were awarded a medal in 1954 for "lasting contributions to children's literature." Surprised by her success, she said after writing her first book, "I thought that would end it. But what do you think? Children who read it wrote to me begging for more. I was amazed because I didn't know how to write. I went to little red schoolhouses all over the West and I never was graduated from anything." She died in 1957.