Today, the small yellow cottage-like the white house opposite, now also owned by the Betsy-Tacy Society-is a home that Betsy Ray would happily recognize. Additional work was done by the crew of the PBS program Hometime. The society worked with local contractors to restore the home. It might have been demolished if it hadn’t been purchased by the Betsy-Tacy Society in 2001.

In the decades that followed, the Center Street house had a number of owners and eventually fell into disrepair. In 1906, the Harts moved from this house to another, larger Mankato home the family moved to Minneapolis in 1910.

Upstairs were two more bedrooms, one shared by Maud and her older sister, Kathleen (Julia in the books). Built in the early 1890s, it had a kitchen, dining room, back and front parlors, and one bedroom downstairs. The Hart family home was pretty, but not luxurious. “Back in Mankato I wrote stories in notebooks and illustrated them with pictures cut from magazines.” “I cannot remember back to a year in which I did not consider myself to be a writer,” she recalled decades later. From an early age, she was set on a literary career. Her family moved into the house on Center Street a few months after her birth and stayed there until 1906.

Both houses give you the opportunity to experience the real-life setting of a uniquely appealing fictional world. Both the Hart and Kenney homes have been restored and opened for tours by the Mankato-based Betsy-Tacy Society. Their parents, siblings, and friends all appear-under different names-in the books. There was a real Betsy (Lovelace, originally Hart) and a real Tacy (her friend Frances “Bick” Kenney). What not all Betsy-Tacy readers may realize is that Lovelace drew the Deep Valley stories from her own life in Mankato, a small city about 90 miles south of Minneapolis. Along the way are birthday parties, adventurous excursions up The Big Hill behind Betsy’s house and to the Opera House downtown, elementary and high school, and, eventually, Betsy’s efforts to find true love and begin a writing career. Starting with two small girls in the 1890s, the series follows Betsy and Tacy into young adulthood. Real-Life Setting of a Most Popular Fictional Worldīlume is not alone: nearly 80 years after Lovelace published her first Betsy-Tacy book, the stories of the two devoted friends and their families remain among the most charming and evocative portraits of childhood in American literature.

Betsy and tacy books in order