For fans of the Little House on the Prairie television show, you probably know that a lot of the situations and relationships that happened in the television show did not happen in real life. And this is especially true for Mary Ingalls. For example, she never married in real life nor had any children. But did she go to Blind school as depicted in the television show?
Yes, Mary did go to school for the blind, known as the Iowa college for the blind. This is detailed quite heavily in the later books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, where Laura and her family were saving up money so they could send Mary to college, and to afford to be able to keep her as a student there. So this is one of the instances in the television show that did resemble her actual life, although the school was completely different and Mary was not a teacher herself, but a student.
Between 1881 and 1889, Mary attended the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School, located in Vinton, Iowa, or more commonly known as the Iowa School for the Blind. there was not a school for blind students located in South Dakota, where the Ingalls were living at the time in real life.
For more on the real life of Mary Ingalls, you can read her biography here. And there’s also an article about the Iowa school during the era that Mary Ingalls attended.
