Hmong families find their 'Little House on the Prairie' in Walnut Grove, Minn.

WALNUT GROVE, MINN. – Gao Vang smiles shyly as a woman in a pioneer-style floral dress approaches her ticket counter on a rainy afternoon, hoping to learn about a young girl who lived in a little house on the prairie here 150 years ago.

Vang works a summer job at the gift shop of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, a veritable mecca of Americana. She hands the woman and her family their tickets and directs them toward the exhibits — the covered wagon, the little red school house and memorabilia from the Hollywood stars in the "Little House on the Prairie" TV show.

Vang, a 14-year-old Hmong American girl, said she loves talking to these visitors who come to her small town in rural Minnesota from all over the world — from Japan, from France, from across America. Later this week, celebrities from the 1970s TV show will arrive in Walnut Grove for the 50th anniversary celebration, including cast members such as Dean Butler and Alison Arngrim, who played the antagonistic Nellie Oleson.

They make the pilgrimage here for Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the series of now-famous books, fictionalized but based on her life on the frontier, that made Walnut Grove famous. Vang is a fan of the books, she said, with its themes on the importance of family and self-sufficiency.

In the books, Laura Ingalls Wilder's family comes to Walnut Grove as her father searches for a parcel of fertile land. Charles Ingalls brought the family from Wisconsin to New Ulm, Minn., which he thought was too crowded, a town history says. He decided to keep moving, bringing his family to Walnut Grove, where he purchased a sod dugout on the banks of Plum Creek.

A century and a half later, Gao Vang's family, like Laura Ingalls Wilder's, would come to Walnut Grove in search of a better life, as part of a story that echoes the town's past and present.

Journey to Plum Creek

Her father, Ger Vang, brought his family to Walnut Grove after a long journey that began in Laos more than 40 years ago.

Ger Vang is 57, although he is unsure of his exact age. Memories of his youth visibly pain him. Death and bombings is how he describes it. During the Cold War, the U.S. secretly armed Hmong militias in Laos to fight communists in southeast Asia. Then U.S. forces withdrew in 1973, leading to massacres of those who helped them. Ger Vang wound up in a refugee camp in Thailand and came to America as part of a wave of immigration in 1982, supported by Lutheran church organizations.

He arrived in St. Paul as a teenager with little understanding of English, Ger Vang recalled. In the coming years, he'd get a job driving elders in the Hmong community to their doctor appointments and translating for them. He'd meet his wife, Ka Ying Yang, and they'd have eight children together.

But the pair wanted to raise their children somewhere quieter than in St. Paul. They feared their children would follow the path of other Hmong teens by dropping out of school or joining gangs. Ger Vang feared he escaped the violence back home only to find another kind of danger in America. He said he asked friends and relatives where the family should go. They told him to go to Walnut Grove.

Somewhere safe

Walnut Grove saw an influx of Hmong residents in the early 2000s. Only one person was listed as being solely of Asian descent in 2000, but that number would jump to 305 a decade later, according to an account of the Hmong community by local historian Daniel Peterson.

Today the town of about 734 residents is 43% Asian and 22% foreign born, according to the latest census data from 2022. Walnut Grove has a Hmong grocery store on Main Street, with a mural on the side depicting Laura Ingalls Wilder and a Hmong girl in traditional attire.

The Hmong families that first came to Walnut Grove, like Ger Vang, said they were drawn by inexpensive real estate and a desire to raise their children somewhere safe.

Gao's mother, Ka Ying Yang, 43, is a paraprofessional at the local school. When the Hmong community first moved to Walnut Grove in the early 2000s, there were a few reported incidents of frostiness by longtime residents, including an anonymous letter that suggested that the newcomers should leave.

But Yang said the town has welcomed her family since they arrived in 2018. "I feel safe here. Everyone knows each other," she said.

Not all of her children like the small-town feel of Walnut Grove. The second-oldest child, Mau Vang, 15, said he misses the family's home in St. Paul, where there were more people and more things to do. Many children of the original Hmong families who moved here in the early 2000s have left for larger cities for school or better work, a dynamic that has bedeviled many rural communities.

Gao Vang, for her part, said she likes how everyone knows each other in Walnut Grove. She said she's encountered some racist teasing by other schoolchildren. But when this happens, she has friends who can talk with her in the Hmong language, she said.

She plans to enroll in a Hmong language program at school next year and hopes one day to be an emergency medical technician and save lives.

On any given day, Ger Vang can be found puttering in his garden 5 miles outside town, past the dugout where Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family once lived. Well-known around town as a good gardener, he and his children this year are growing squash, cucumber, cilantro, eggplant and corn, which they sell at farmer's markets across southwest Minnesota.

Not many Hmong residents participate in Little House on the Prairie events in Walnut Grove, such as an annual pageant or this weekend's 50th anniversary cast reunion.

Gao Vang's parents said they're proud that their daughter works at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum.

Her mother hopes she can be an example for others in the Walnut Grove Hmong community. "Hopefully, it will inspire more Hmong people to join in," Yang said.

Ger Vang joked that he is happy that his daughter makes more money at her part-time summer job than he did at full-time jobs when he first came to America.

"I just say I'm lucky I come to the right country, you know?" Ger Vang said. "The best country in the world."