News

Our first collaboration is this gorgeous BELLA+CANVAS tee featuring Vera Neville's illustration of our trio making herbariums, beautifully colored by BTS Site Manager Kat Hohenstein.

The shirts come in two styles, “fitted" and “relaxed," in a range of adult sizes, with a choice of six colors in each style.

BELLA+CANVAS has a sterling reputation: high-quality apparel, super-soft fabric, and very true to size.

It's a different model for us: You will purchase the shirts directly from Mike, who is hosting a Betsy-Tacy Apparel online store out of Fully Promoted. He will create the shirts in-house twice a month, and we will then ship them to you.

This is the first of MANY items we plan to offer! If you have a favorite illustration and/or a specific type of apparel you'd like to see in the Fully Promoted store, please let us know via our Shop Suggestion Box.

Any questions, don't hesitate to ask. Happy shopping!

The Vera Neville illustration is used with the kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers. The Betsy-Tacy Society has the exclusive rights to use the Lenski and Neville Betsy-Tacy illustrations in/on our Shop products.

Annual Donation Drive 2026

We worked with The Creative Company on a 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐬𝐲-𝐓𝐚𝐜𝐲 𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 called Betsy-Tacy for Small Children.

With beautifully colored illustrations (the originals by Lois Lenski!) and a simple adaptation of Maud's words and stories, this hardcover edition will captivate the youngest readers and serve as an early introduction to the world of Betsy-Tacy.

We are simply thrilled with this sweet new book, and we hope you – and your littlest friends – love it too.

Purchase your copy today!

p.s. The subtitle is an homage to Lois Lenski's “Small" characters (Farmer Small, Papa Small, Engineer Small, Pilot Small, etc.)!

Our Amazon Wish List

Want to be part of the Betsy-Tacy Houses and support our work in a very concrete and tangible way? Check out our Wish List on Amazon.com and see the various items we’d love to receive. (Many years ago, a member donated a new vacuum to Tacy’s House, and every time she visits she checks to see how “her” vacuum is doing! 🤣) We update this list regularly. Thank you for your support!

—> Looking for older News stories? They can be found here.

The BTS Annual Donation Drive is our biggest fundraiser of the year. Our goal was to raise $35K by April 11 – and with your help, we did it!

See the list of donors and the total amount raised.

In addition to covering our largest ongoing expenses (keeping two historic houses in good shape and accessible to visitors and paying our wonderful staff), a portion of donations of $200 or more will go toward this year’s important goal: ‍

“Beloved Books Outreach”

We are ready to literally get the books into more readers’ hands and build partnerships to help us spread the good word of Betsy-Tacy – and we have SO MANY ideas for how to do this! One thing that will be especially helpful is having individual editions of the books to work with, rather than the larger combo volumes. The challenge is that – with the exception of the first four books – individual versions are no longer being printed.  

This is where our donors come in! We are using a portion of the funds raised to purchase your favorite titles from online booksellers and will then use them in our planned outreach: engaging elementary-school teachers and homeschooling families in Mankato, reaching out to libraries in states where we have few members, stocking Little Free Libraries, etc. etc.

Each book we share will contain a sticker with info about the Betsy-Tacy Society and – if the donor chooses – their name and why they especially love this particular title.  

Thank you for your support!

Events

Click here to see our 2026 Events Calendar.

Note: “Deep Valley Time” (i.e., Central Time) is our default when listing an event. To be sure that you’ve correctly calculated the time difference for your location, we suggest using an online world clock such as this one.