![]() ![]() “As I remember, she was kind of a prim lady, very proper. “She was reserved, dressed nice and all,” Turner recalled. The woman who would become one of the most famous authors in the United States of America was then just another resident of Mansfield, Missouri, a thriving town that would fill up with horses and wagons each Saturday afternoon when the farmers would come to town to sell their crops in the square and the stores would stay open until 9’o’clock. ![]() I’ve forgotten just what it brought, but it wasn’t very much.” If only they’d waited a few years. ![]() “And she said well, I can’t give you a donation, but I can give you a hand-written poem-and we sold that poem at the pie supper. Wilder at her place, Rocky Ridge Farm,” he chuckled. “When I was a senior in high school, we were having a pie supper to raise money for our class, and myself and a girl went out to see Mrs. After a few call transfers, Turner, now in his eighties, came onto the line. ![]() After stumbling across his name in Caroline Fraser’s powerful new biography Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I called the bank in Mansfield to see if I could track him down. There are now just a handful of people left alive who knew Laura Ingalls Wilder, and William Turner, the former chairman of the Great Southern Bank, is one of them. ![]()
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