Mrs. Wilder has a Fair Time at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition: San Francisco, 1915

This Friday marks the Centennial of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco, which opened 20 February 1915. Fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder will recognize this as the fair which she attended while on an extended visit with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was living in the Bay area at the time.

Laura’s explorations at the Fair were preserved in the form of many letters and postcards to her husband, Almanzo Wilder, who necessarily stayed home to mind the farm. These letters form the basis for a posthumously-published work, West From Home. Wilder also used her visit as fodder for a series of articles in The Missouri Ruralist, a farm journal for which she had been writing since 1911.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Panama-Pacific-fair-changed-San-Francisco-forever-6080573.php#/0

I found this leather-bound reporter’s notebook, embossed with the PPIE logo, in an antiques store in Meredith, New Hampshire in 2010 for a mere $3.00. The notebook contains a small pencil-loop on the right side, and retains over half of its original blank paper. The exterior measures approximately 2″ wide x 3-1/4″ high and 3/8″ thick.

Two blank souvenir postcards from the 1915 PPIE in San Francisco, located at a group antiques dealer shop in Concord, New Hampshire in 2014. The images featured are the Machinery Palace (top) and The Palace of Liberal Arts (bottom).

My Review of a Book Review: The Novel, A WILDER ROSE.

Sometimes, I just can’t resist commenting. And as far as I am concerned, it is equally as dangerous to assume that a novel is to be relied upon as fact as it is to assume that one person’s private journals and correspondence are not somehow biased. My comments below are geared toward the reviewer, NOT toward the author of the recent novel, A WILDER ROSE, Susan Wittig Albert, who defines her own work as a novel, not fact, and who spent a great deal of time reading Rose Wilder Lane’s personal papers to use them as a springboard for the story. To be clear, I am in full support of everyone coming to their own conclusions; however, I feel it is imperative to point out logical fallacies and lack of substantive evidence when appropriate. I don’t think there is any way to ever know with 100% certainty exactly what happened in the collaborative process between Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. All Wilder scholars know that a collaboration happened on some level or another between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. But leaving out facts to make an argument only serves to undermine that argument. I have reblogged the review as it was contained in the Discover Laura blog, in its entirety. My own comments follow the Discover Laura Blog piece.