In a letter to daughter Rose written in 1952, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote: “We were proud of my Havalind [sic] china but loved best the English made blue willow ware.”
In Farmer Boy (Chapter 2, “Winter Evening”), Almanzo thinks that “the most beautiful sight was his mother, bring in the big willow-ware platter full of sizzling ham.”
I always wondered if the Wilders actually owned willow-ware, or if Laura “loaned” her favorite blue willow to the story. Laura’s blue willow was made by Allertons (not Allerton). I’ve never researched this pattern simply because I don’t like blue willow.
In The Laura Ingalls Wilder Country Cookbook, there is a Les Kelly photograph of the Wilder’s dining room table set with Laura’s blue willow. Why, I always wondered, is the fork on the right and the knife on the left? For that matter, why is the goblet on the left? The photo isn’t a mirror image, because you can clearly see the door to the kitchen on the left, and a bit of the underside of Rose’s loft staircase at the left of the pass-through behind the table.
In the museum at Rocky Ridge, there is a photograph of a table of Rose’s, and in that photo, the fork is on the right, as in the Les Kelly photo. That photo IS a reversal of the photo that accompanied the 1960 article by Rose titled, “Come Into My Kitchen.” I could only guess that perhaps there was nobody around to tell Les Kelly the proper way to set a table, so he ran to the museum and copied that one.
I guess that explains the blue willow display in the museum at Walnut Grove. In their table setting, they also placed the fork on the left, etc.
Hey, people. Just because somebody does something incorrectly three times, that doesn’t make it right, you know.
We don’t know how Laura set her own table. She did write in By the Shores of Silver Lake (Chapter 21, “Merry Christmas”) that the breakfast table was set with the “plate turned bottom up over the knife and fork, as usual.”
Now, that’s a strange way to set a table (to me), no matter which side the fork is on beneath that plate!
