When I was a kid, I believed that Laura and Mary were running down a hill in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in the opening credits of Little House on the Prairie. At 10 years old, it never occurred to me that any Little House on the Prairie filming locations were anywhere other than the places they were called on the show. I was a trusting child. With shows like The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, or even Happy Days, I thought they were filmed in the houses the TV families lived in. So of course, the places where this show was filmed couldn’t be anywhere other than Walnut Grove.
While the real Ingalls family spent years roaming the Midwest, the TV Ingalls family barely touched a blade of Minnesota grass. Instead, the production traded the flat plains of the prairie for the sun-baked hills of Southern California.
Little House on the Prairie Filming Locations
So where was Little House on the Prairie filmed if not in Walnut Grove, Minnesota? Here’s a look at the Little House on the Prairie filming locations.
Big Sky Ranch in Simi Valley, California
The eart of the LHOP’s exterior world was Big Sky Ranch, located in Simi Valley, California.
Spanning thousands of acres, this massive property served as the backdrop for almost every outdoor scene from 1974 to 1983. The production crew built the entire fictional town of Walnut Grove from scratch including Oleson’s Mercantile, the church/schoolhouse, and Hanson’s Mill.
- The Terrain Give-Away: If you watch the show closely with a critical eye, you’ll notice a few regional anomalies. Minnesota is notoriously flat, but the landscape surrounding the TV version of Walnut Grove is distinctly mountainous and covered in California chaparral. You can even spot the occasional Southern California drought turning the supposedly lush “prairie” a crispy, golden brown.
- The Dramatic End: If you’re hoping to make a pilgrimage to see the original town buildings, you are out of luck. For the 1984 TV movie finale, The Last Farewell, Michael Landon chose to blow up the sets on camera rather than dismantle them, fulfilling a contract requirement to return the leased ranchland to its original condition.
Paramount and MGM Studios
While the rolling hills were pure California fresh air, the cozy, rough-hewn interiors of the Ingalls home, the blind school, and the town shops were entirely confined to Hollywood soundstages.
For the first five seasons, the cast and crew shot interior scenes at the Paramount Studios lot in Los Angeles. By season six, production packed up and moved to the MGM Studios lot in Culver City, using its massive soundstages to keep the indoor sets unified.
Other Little House on the Prairie Filming Locations
Whenever the script required the Ingalls family to venture away from Walnut Grove, the production unit traveled to a few other classic Hollywood backlots:
- Red Hills Ranch (Sonora, California): When the show needed thick pine forests or high-altitude scener, like the episodes where the families went camping, they headed north to the Sierra Nevada foothills. This area also provided landscapes used in various outdoor treks throughout the series.
- Old Tucson Studios (Tucson, Arizona): For episodes featuring fairs, dusty travel stops, or distinct western towns, production utilized the famous Old Tucson backlot. Look closely at the background of these episodes, and you can occasionally spot a rogue cactus that definitely doesn’t belong in the Upper Midwest.
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