Sammy's feelings are hurt when his friends start teasing him.

A history of the area that would become Walnut Station, then Walnut Grove from the earliest days to the present. It covers almost every aspect of community life in this small town in Minnesota.

With a New Preface by the Author Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.–Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.

Laura and her family move to Minnesota where they live in a dugout until a new house is built and face misfortunes caused by flood, blizzard, and grasshoppers.

The Walnut Grove General Baptist Church thrives in the southwest part of Douglas County, Missouri, miles from any town, store, post office, or school. This book is about the history of that church and the people it served for many years. The beginning of Walnut Grove as a community dates back to before the Civil War when a cemetery was established. In 1894, the people of the area constructed the Walnut Grove Community Building/Church next to the old Walnut Grove Cemetery. The building housed the Walnut Grove General Baptist Church from the time the church was founded in 1926 until 1982 when a new church building was constructed. But the old Community Building/Church building was restored and is still used. The history of these buildings, its churches, and the people are all covered in this book. In tracing that history, the author is honoring all who lived, loved and worshiped at the Walnut Grove General Baptist Church and the entire community.

Charlotte struggles to adjust when her mother moves the family to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, the small, boring town where pioneer author Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up, in hopes of finding inspiration for her writing career.