(Excerpts from a letter written by Maud Hart Lovelace, 1961)

"As you set out to explore Mankato, the Deep Valley of the Betsy-Tacy books...you must remember that years have passed since Betsy. Tacy and Tib are children here. To find Deep Valley in this bustling modern city, you have to close your eyes to the airport, to the streams of automobiles and to many beautiful new homes and schools and shops. You have to imagine horses and carriages, ladies with trailing skirts and ruffled parasols, Children in long black stockings.

You are fortunate to be starting your search in one of the least changed places — Betsy's beloved Public Library. It looks much as it did when she first visited the Children's Room although the Isle of Delos no longer hangs over the mantel...It is hard to imagine Joe and Betsy studying for the Essay Contest.

When you leave the library you find yourself on Broad Street Walking south you will See for yourselves the green lawns, the shade trees, the hospitable porches and the Churches. You will come at last to Lincoln park, the "Pie-shaped wedge of lawn with an elm tree and a fountain on it" which marked the boundary of the Hill Street neighborhood.

— Betsy's Hill St. house hasn't changed much, although the back yard maple is gone...Mr. Ray planted the maples you now see in front of the house. Tacy's house itself looks much as it used to, but the large back yard where the kitchen garden, the pump, and the barn and buggy shed used to be, was long since cut up into building lots.

The Hill Street hill of the stories is of course, the Center Street hill, and that does not look as it did in Betsy's day, for a stone embankment has been built around the base of the slope. Try to imagine the little bench — I wish it were still there! — where Betsy and Tacy so loved to each their suppers and where they often sat with Tib to make important plans.

The Big Hill rises behind Betsy's house. A road used to run straight to the top, but now a much finer one winds upward...and on the top of the Big Hill, where once the sun came up behind a lone white house, there are scores of modern homes, but the view from the top is still the same. You can still look out across the roofs of the town all the way to Sibley Park-Page Park. Walking south, along the summit, you may possibly find some remnants of the Secret Lane, and continuing south, you come out on the crest where Betsy, Tacy and Tib so often picnicked. It looks down into the lovely valley where the Syrians once lived along James Avenue.

Look around the Center Street and Byron Street and Clark and Pleasant Streets. This Neighborhood is full of places where the characters in the Betsy-Tacy series used to live.

The Ray's High Street house stood at the corner of South Fifth and Cherry...If you stroll down Fifth Street to the north, you will take the walk Betsy and her friends took every day, going to the red brick turreted high school on the corner across from the Court House. From this corner you can descend to Front St."

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