Our Missouri Podcast

It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns on the battlefield fell silent to mark the signing of the armistice that ended World War I. Yet, for all the hope of peace and a return to normalcy, this First World War, as it would later be called, merely marked the opening act of a century dominated by global conflict.

In 1935, Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, was at a crossroads in her life. Financially, she had weathered the low points of the Great Depression but still found herself on unstable ground after orchestrating the construction of a new building called the Rock House on her family's Mansfield property. Personally, the relationship between Rose and her mother had grown especially strained.

Once upon a time, sixty years ago (now nearly 150 years ago), a little girl lived in the big woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs. With that opening scene, Laura Ingalls Wilder launched the Little House book series that eventually became a key piece of American culture. But, did you know, that despite her stories of little houses on the prairies of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, and the Dakota Territory, Laura Ingalls Wilder actually spent a majority of her life in the tiny town of Mansfield, Missouri?

On February 5, 1911, a storm blew in to Jefferson City, Missouri, that most residents alive at the time would never forget. As the storm raged, a bolt of lightning struck the dome of the Missouri State Capitol building. By morning, despite the brave efforts of residents to save the structure and its contents, the fire-ravaged ruins of the capitol were all that remained.

Current visitors to the Missouri State Capitol Building in Jefferson City will notice large sections of the facility blocked off due to an ongoing construction project to update and maintain the more than 100-year-old structure. While its exterior grandeur might be presently obscured by scaffolding, this episode's guest, Bob Priddy, takes us to all corners of the historic structure in a discussion of his book The Art of the Missouri Capitol: History in Canvas, Bronze, and Stone, co-authored by Jeffrey Ball.