Making It Home: Laura Ingalls Wilder's 1890s Missouri Parlor
When 1899 turned to 1900, the thriving town of Mansfield, Missouri, turned out for church services, bonfires, and celebrations, recalls Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Back then, Laura wasn't a famous author. She and husband Almanzo weren't even the successful farmers they'd hoped to become in "the land of the big red apple." However, life running a boarding house in Mansfield wasn't all bad. Laura was made a Worthy Matron of the Order of the Eastern Star, and she finally had a "decorated" parlor.
What did it look like? And how can you recreate the look?
To understand and recreate the Wilder parlor, you have to toss out your preconceptions about the late 1800s as an era of William Morris and "Arts and Crafts" furniture. Arts and Crafts was for affluent intellectuals. The less intellectual but still affluent bought colonial-era antiques (or good reproductions). Ordinary people bought mass-produced golden oak furniture from the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs, in a vernacular style that was vaguely but non-specifically historic. The outlines nodded to the Tudor, the straight lines bowed to the simplifying "reform" movement, and the applied scrollwork ornamentation bore a whiff of Regency. The overall effect, at its "$59 for six pieces in figured plush" best, said "we've arrived" to the toiling masses.(These 3 pieces from a set are a typical low-end design.)
"We've arrived" was an important message. Mail order catalogs and free rural delivery had made it possible for a farmhouse in the hinterlands to have as lavish a parlor as you'd find in any urban worker tract. While the kitchen might still say "country" (and there might be no dining room at all), the parlor was all plush and polished wood, with lace curtains at the windows and a flowered rug on the floor. A parlor was emphatically not a family room (that was the kitchen); it was reserved for formal entertaining.
Try the Wilder parlor look if you have one of the thousands of "worker cottages" or tiny rowhouses that were built in cities in the 1880s and 1890s, or if you live in a modest rural frame house of the same era. It's also an effective way to add coziness and charm to the small, characterless living room of a mid-twentieth century tract house. The small scale of the furniture works well in small rooms, and its plushness and ornamentation warms up a space with little detailing of its own.
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