Little House on the Prairie

- Season 5

(1978)

Poor financial conditions influence the Ingalls family to move to Winoka when Mary goes there to teach at the Blind School. They meet Albert, an orphan who Charles forms an attachment to, even though Laura catches him stealing from the hotel that Charles was managing and Caroline was running the kitchen/dining room for.

While Mary is going to teach at the Blind School in Winoka, and since financially they can't make a living in Walnut Grove the rest of the Ingalls family goes to Winoka, too. Charles gets a job managing a hotel and Caroline runs the Kitchen/Dining room. They make the acquaintance of an orphan, Albert who befriends the Ingalls.

Trying to convince Tom Carlin, blinded by a childhood bout with the measles, that he can lead a productive life, Adam Kendall battles Tom's bitter, skeptical father and is unexpectedly aided by the underdog Winoka Warriors, who have just lost their star player to a rival football team.

Amelia Bevins is a new girl at school. Laura asks her to go home with her the afternoon of her first day at school to work on their essays and they go by the Blind School on the way home. When they get there, Laura and Albert and Andy start making fun of the over-weight man who has started working there. Amelia makes an excuse and runs off. Unbeknownst to them, it's her father. Before they leave, Adam comes out and introduces Mr. Bevins and Laura realizes her mistake. That evening when Mr. Bevins goes home, he overhears his daughter telling his wife how her father ...

Caroline talks to Mary and Mary convinces Charles that he should not have to stay in Winoka if he is unhappy. So, the Ingalls decide they are going back to Walnut Grove. They invite Albert to go back with them. The children at the blind school give them a horseshoe to hang over their door and sing them home with the song about a horseshoe over the door. The Garveys and the Olsens go home, too.

The Ingalls, Garveys, Olsens, and Albert get back to Walnut Grove to find it run down and in shabby condition. Lars Hansen found Walnut Grove over 50 years ago, and now that it is in this poor condition, and he suffered a stroke, he is much like the town--on its last leg. The Ingalls and the Garveys go to the farms around town to let everyone know of their plans to fix the town up to restore it to its former glory.

Laura Ingalls becomes jealous of the extra attention her father pays to new family member, Albert, especially after the boy is given a new calf to raise for the county fair, and asked to call Charles "Pa".

Sterling Murdoch arrives in Walnut Grove planning to found a newspaper. The fledgling newspaper is The Pen and the Plow, and its star reporter is none other than one Harriet Olesen. At first, everyone including the Ingalls welcome the newspaper, but the completely inaccurate content of the "Harriet's Happenings" column soon has some people losing their enthusiasm. Nels reminds his wife that a reporter's job is to be accurate, but Mrs. Olesen suggests she's merely "reporting the fact that they are rumors"; he is even more frustrated when she suggests holding an ...

Mary Ingalls happily accepts Adam Kendall's long-awaited marriage proposal but gets cold feet when she begins to consider the implications of two blind parents raising a family.

While their fathers secretly trail them, young Albert Ingalls and Andy Garvey set off to prove their mettle as men by accepting a challenge to live by their wits during a week-long, overland walk from Walnut Grove to Sleepy Eye and back.

Andy is doing poorly in school to the embarrassment of his mother who is the current teacher. Mrs. Garvey hires Nellie Olesen to tutor Andy. Nellie shows Andy how she has been cheating and threatens him to do the same and not tell.

Mr. Standish buys the building that the Blind school has been housed in and wants to turn it into a hotel. He gives the blind school 30 days to move. Adam and Mary send a letter to Charles telling them to alert them if they hear of an available place. Rev. Alden tells Charles that when he died, Lars Hansen left the deed to a big house in his care. It's too big to sell to one family so he hasn't been able to unload it, but it's perfectly big enough for a blind school. The church votes to clean it up and get it ready for the blind school to take it over. The Winoka ...

Joe Kagen joins Charles and goes to Winoka because they're going to have an extra wagon to bring home. They get to the blind school and see the awful team of horses and the wagon that Mr. Standish tricked Adam into buying even though his contract clearly stated that he would have the best team in the stable. Charles takes the horses into the saloon and convinces Mr. Standish that those aren't his best team and wagon. Then, Charles is surprised in Winoka to find out that Harriet has joined them for the trip home. On the trip, Harriet says she prefers to walk instead of...

Charles has the opportunity to earn $50 by helping run new telephone lines for 30 days. While he's away, Laura and Albert's time is used up with doing extra chores. Caroline is also busy and doesn't have time to deal with Carrie, so she is sent off on her own with some trivial job to do. She goes to pick some strawberries, but when she sees how little they are, she figures it will take her all day to pick enough for a pie. She falls asleep and dreams that a beautiful girl who looks just like her, named Elissa, takes her to a world where there are strawberries as big ...

Albert becomes an apprentice for a craftsman who is Jewish. His classmates accuse him of being a Jew-lover and Laura is embarrassed because they accuse her when she tells them to quit picking on Albert. Albert learns to take pride in his work and when Mr. Isaac Singerman dies at the end of the summer, Albert follows his way of planting an acorn to grow a tree to repay the earth for the one he used in his carpentry.

Laura Ingalls is horrified to witness the fall from a tree that blinds her friend, Jordan Harrison, while he's performing a circus stunt. But when she finds out that Jordan's sight has returned, Laura must decide whether it's right when he asks her to keep it a secret, especially after Jordan tells her that his parents' concern for him appears to have brought them back from the brink of divorce.

Charles and Jonathan are picking up a freight delivery for Mr. Olesen when they bump into Toby Noe, an old friend from Winoka. Charles convinces him to come visit them in Walnut Grove. Toby comes to visit. He goes to church with the Ingalls the next day and when he's greeting people at the door, Rev. Alden tells Charles they need to have a meeting to find someone who can play their new organ instead of Harriet. Toby can play, so he agrees to play that very morning. Unfortunately, he's a spirited player and Miss Amanda Cooper fusses at Rev. Alden for that '...

Adam Kendall is more than a little surprised when wife Mary's letter to his estranged father announcing her pregnancy brings the man to Walnut Grove. But it soon appears that the anticipation of a sighted grandson and not a change of heart towards his blind son may be the reason for the elder Kendall's visit.

Kezia doesn't believe in paying property taxes, and it isn't long before Mrs. Oleson decides to foreclose on the property and purchase it for herself as the family's vacation home. Nels objects to the purchase, knowing she had acquired it unfairly and that Kezia would have no place to go, but Mrs. Oleson responds by moving herself and Nellie and Willie to the lakeside property. Mrs. Oleson, in a show of pity, hires Kezia to be their servant and forces her to live in the shack. Laura, Albert and Andy watch from afar and are disgusted at how cruelly the three Olesons ...

Jonathan loses his cool at Jud Larrabee for not keeping his word about not changing their prices when someone comes along to buy grain from them. Later, Larrabee goes to Jonathan's to "get back" but finds his son, Andy, and attacks him. Andy goes to his father and they go back home and they find their barn on fire. They think Larrabee did it so they go and arrest him. He's brought to trial. Larrabee claims what happened to Andy was an accident and that he didn't burn the barn.

Hoping for a miracle, Charles takes Mary to a specialist in Mankato to find out if the light she has been seeing means that her sight may be returning, while husband Adam worries that she won't need him anymore, and an excited Laura enlists Albert's help to fix up an abandoned cabin to serve as the Kendalls' new home.

While out of town to buy horses, Charles Ingalls boards with Brett Harper, a man who is emotionally withdrawn from his unhappy family and trying to lose himself in work and whiskey, blaming himself for the accidental death of his oldest son in a riding accident four years earlier.

Charles and Jonathan meet with danger as deadly as the disease they left behind them when they are sent for the medical supplies needed to battle an outbreak of anthrax in Walnut Grove.

Talented young painter Dylan Whitaker promised his dying father that he would some day see the ocean he loves to put on canvas; but "some day" comes too soon when Dylan is diagnosed with incurable leukemia and, to keep his promise, he and his concerned friends, Laura and Albert, sneak away from Walnut Grove to hop a railroad freight car bound for the California coast.