Childhood Caroline Quiner was born in 1839 15 miles west of
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the
Town of Brookfield, in
Waukesha County. She was the fifth of seven children of Henry and Charlotte Quiner. Her brothers were Joseph, Henry, and Thomas, and her sisters were Martha, and Eliza. (The Quiners' first child, Martha Morse Quiner, died in 1836.) When Caroline was 5, her father died while serving as
second mate on a ship, the schooner
Ocean, when it capsized in
Lake Michigan, off
St. Joseph, Michigan. There were no survivors. In 1849, her mother married farmer Frederick Holbrook. They had one child together, Lottie Holbrook. Caroline Quiner would later honor her stepfather’s memory by naming her son after him. At the age of 16½, Quiner started working as a teacher.
Marriage On February 1, 1860, Quiner married
Charles Phillip Ingalls in
Concord, Wisconsin. Together they had five children:
Mary Amelia,
Laura Elizabeth,
Caroline Celestia (Carrie),
Charles Frederick (Freddie), and
Grace Pearl.
Freddie Ingalls Charles Frederick "Freddie" Ingalls was born on November 1, 1875, in
Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and died August 27, 1876, in
South Troy, Minnesota, of indeterminate causes. In her autobiography
Pioneer Girl, Laura remembers that "Little Brother was not well" and that "one terrible day, he straightened out his little body and was dead". Wilder scholar
William Anderson noted: "Nearly forty years after Freddie's death, Ma mourned him, telling relatives how different everything would be 'if Freddie had lived'."
Travels and later years The Ingalls family traveled by covered wagon from
Wisconsin;
Kansas (Indian Territory);
Burr Oak, Iowa; and
Minnesota. In 1879, they settled in
De Smet in
Dakota Territory. After arriving in De Smet, the Ingalls family lived in the home of the local surveyor as well as a store in the downtown area, before homesteading just outside town on a farm by Silver Lake. When the Ingalls family sold the farm due to a persistent pattern of dry years, Charles built a home for them on Third Street in De Smet, known later as "The House That Pa Built". Following her husband's death from heart disease in 1902 at age 66, Ingalls and her oldest daughter, Mary, rented one of the rooms for extra income. Following a long illness, Caroline Ingalls died on April 20, 1924, at the age of 84. ==In the media==