Burr Oak is a little town just inside the northern border of Iowa. The prime attraction here is the Masters Hotel where Laura and her family lived for a short while during the autumn to spring of 1876/77. TV watchers and book readers alike will mystified as to it's significance since Laura never mentions this part of her life in her books. However, the museum boasts, correctly, that this is the only house in which Laura lived as a child which still exists in it's original place. I think that only those seeking the 'real life ' of Laura, or those interested the life of people generally in the 1870's will find this interesting. The hotel is now a museum, and different rooms have been set up as they would have been in the 1870's and stories are told by the guide of the various characters who lived and stayed in the Hotel. Many of the people and their lives sound interesting and I couldn't help feeling that Laura had lost an opportunity to write about her time here. However, the characters living in the hotel were a little too 'interesting' for Ma and Pa, for they moved out of the hotel and into a house (now pulled down) on the outskirts of the town where they felt it would be safer for the girls. It was in that house that Grace was born. A charming little river flows behind the hotel, swollen by heavy rain just before our visit. The town is surrounded by rolling hills and wooded slopes and is as beautiful as Laura describes it in her memoirs. The Ingalls however left it forever in the summer of 1877.
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