As the weather warms and the days get longer, the need to get back outside and explore our larger home starts to grow. After being inside the same four walls for much of the winter, it's a great time to venture just a little beyond Springfield - far enough to explore something new but close enough to easily travel in a day. The town of Mansfield beckons. With its small-town charm and historical landmarks, it offers a solid day of exploring and learning about the 19th century.
Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, 3060 Highway A
For anyone who spent a good portion of their childhood absorbed in the Little House on the Prairie books, Wilder's home, Rocky Ridge Farm, is a must see. Visitors can explore the home and learn about Wilder's life, developing an understanding of pioneer life. Visit the beloved original farmhouse and the Rock House, the home their daughter had built for them. Don't forget to stop by the museum to see artifacts from Wilder's childhood.
Baker Creek, 2278 Baker Creek Road
After exploring the legacy of Wilder, stop by Baker Creek to explore not just its heirloom seeds but its trial gardens, greenhouses and pioneer village where Jere Gettle started the business as a teenager. Grab a bite at its restaurant with a plant-based menu of “locally sourced and globally inspired” dishes. As much as possible, the ingredients are harvested fresh from the greenhouses and gardens at Baker Creek or purchased from local growers. Take a walk around the boutique, which comes out of its winter slumber in March and carries a collection of Western-inspired clothing for men, women, and children, plus home goods, gourmet coffee and organic teas and spices.
Need more direct contact with nature after the winter? Head out to Rocky Falls in Winona. Just around two hours from Springfield, Rocky Falls offers a place to connect with the beauty and turbulence of nature. The reddish-brown rock here is rhyolite porphyry. It formed as molten rock deep within the earth and flowed onto the surface about 1.5 billion years ago.
Since the rhyolite is hard, the stream tends to stay within the cracks it finds, forming “shut in” where the harder rock has “shut in” the stream. Farther downstream, past the constricting rhyolite, the stream valley widens once again. This allows the stream to expand into a pool.