Edelweiss Patterns Little House on the Prairie Wedding Dresses
As a long-time fan of the “Little House” series of books and the “Little House” tv series inspired by these childhood classics, I just love studying the costumes worn in the stories! Laura Ingalls Wilder gave articulate details on all her fashionable dresses in the books “Little Town on the Prairie” and “These Happy Golden Years“. Any Little House fan should know that due to a shortage of time, the real Laura Ingalls’ wedding gown was actually a black cashmere dress! But today I’d like to take a look at the Little House on the Prairie wedding dresses shown on the 1970s tv show.
Which of these three Little House girls wore white wedding gowns for their on-screen weddings?
Mary Ingalls (Melissa Sue Anderson)
Nellie Oleson (Alison Arngrim)
Laura Ingalls (Melissa Gilbert)
The correct answer? None of them! When you watch these girls’ wedding episodes, you will find it amusing that all of the weddings, even if the couples were previously engaged, had something sporadic or unplanned about the actual wedding date. All of them were either married on a different date than planned,were married outside of Walnut Grove, or were married by someone other than their minister Reverend Alden!
Melissa Sue Anderson as Mary Ingalls wore a lovely light blue gown, with long sleeves and a frill of lace at the high neckline. This wedding dress had decorative buttons down the front, and was handed down to Mary from her mother Caroline Ingalls who had supposedly worn it for her own bridal gown. (In reality, Mary Ingalls never married, and the evidence we have suggests that Caroline’s wedding gown was either black or very dark colored. )
Mary & Adam’s wedding took place right after a tornado, and though their local minister began the ceremony, Reverend Alden showed up half way through the speech and took over from that point. The episode in which Mary Ingalls gets married is aptly named “The Wedding“.
Nellie Oleson, one of television’s most hated characters, married her Jewish husband Percival Dalton/Isaac Cohen on very short notice. Their wedding episode, “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not“, suggests that they were engaged for possibly as little as one day, and they were married by Doctor Baker since Percival’s mother didn’t want him married by a “Reverend”.
Nellie (Alison Arngrim) and Percival (Steve Tracy) had had an interesting relationship for a short amount of time, probably a month or so, during which Nellie called him names and Percival poured raw eggs on her head. Since Nellie was such a terrible child all through the Little House series, it was only fitting that she also practically proposed to him!
But about her wedding dress! It was very hard to get a good still shot of the dress since their wedding scene was so short, but it was a lovely pink brocade gown which had a hidden hook-and-eye closure down the back. Nellie Oleson’s wedding dress had a low neckline filled in with white taffeta, and she wore an enormous pink bow in her blonde curled wig.
Laura Ingalls, perhaps the best-loved of all the Little House children, wore her sage green church dress for her unexpected wedding. It wasn’t that she and Almanzo Wilder (Dean Butler), hadn’t been engaged already, and in fact this whole episode shows the ups and downs of their long engagement when Almanzo’s wheat crop fails. But just when everything looks hopeless, Eliza Jane Wilder comes up with a plan to make it work, and Laura and Almanzo get married in the blind school that Mary & Adam work at.
Once again, this wedding takes place in an unfamiliar location (not one of the girls was married in the Walnut Grove church), and Laura and Almanzo were married by a preacher they’d never met before! (This episode is called simply “Laura Ingalls Wilder“).
Laura’s lovely wedding dress was a two-piece sage green linen or cotton, with a lovely pleated “peplum” in the back which revealed light pink insets. In the front, this prairie outfit had princess seams, a pink ruffle at the neckline, and pearly buttons down the front of the bodice.
She wore a shirred and ruched poke bonnet made to match, though for the ceremony itself Laura had baby’s breath flowers in her hair. After the wedding, this outfit was worn quite often by Laura Wilder for parties, church events, and important social functions.
Today the dress worn by Melissa Gilbert for the “Laura Ingalls Wilder” episode is on display at a Wild West museum in Arizona, along with another one of her “young lady” dresses and the gown her mother Caroline wore for the same episode. The dress appear to be in excellent condition, but is displayed without the matching bonnet.
So who did wear a white wedding dress on the “Little House” tv shows? After having the entire series memorized for a number of years, I can only think of two or possibly three weddings where the brides actually wore white.
The most traditional of these was Willie Oleson’s and Rachel Brown’s wedding, which took place in the Walnut Grove church with Reverend Alden performing the ceremony.
Rachel’s white gown was lovely, with lots of bustly bows in the back and ruffled frills of lace at her sleeve ends.
Another wedding that comes to mind was Hester Sue Terhune’s, who wore a spectacular white gown at the height of Victorian 1880s fashion.
Of all the wedding dresses worn for the tv series, this is one my all time favorite Little House costumes!
This one doesn’t count as an actual wedding gown though, because she and her ill-intentioned fiancee’ broke their engagement just moments before the ceremony!
The only other white wedding dress scene that comes to mind is Charles’ and Caroline’s! Obviously the Little House shows didn’t make an episode of their real wedding which would have occurred years before, but in season eight the producers put together a wonderful episode called “I Do, Again” that portrays the mid-life crisis stricken Charles and Caroline having a second wedding. Here again, this wedding takes place outside of Walnut Grove and planned on a short amount of time. Charles & Caroline Ingalls (Michael Landon and Karen Grassle), join a younger couple for a double wedding ceremony and two gorgeous Victorian wedding dresses!
Caroline Ingalls’ friend lends her an heirloom wedding gown which fits her perfectly for their last-minute wedding. While we have no record that anything like this ever occurred in the actual Ingalls family, it made for the most lovely episode!
I hope y0u’ve enjoyed these wedding dresses, and I’d love to hear which Little House costume was your favorite!
What a fun post!
I didn’t recall most of those dresses until I saw the pictures. 🙂 I used to watch that show so much when I was kid.
Funny but I never recalled any wedding. Of course, I also watched it periodically and rarely when I was younger. It also didn’t help to know my mother named me after one of them Melissas!
Hello Melissa,
Yes, there were only a handful of weddings throughout all ten seasons. Besides the ones mentioned, there was only the wedding of Mr. Edwards & Grace, and maybe one or two others that I can’t think of at the moment. But half a dozen weddings isn’t much considering what a plethora of other episodes there were!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Katrina
I remember seeing Laura’s wedding in reruns of the show. At the time, I didn’t appreciate the lack of fanfare in her wedding day. However, my now thirty-seven year old self adores that particular episode. 🙂
Actually, in the past, most wedding gowns were not white. Having a white wedding gown simply signified that your father was wealthy enough to have a dress made to be worn for only one occasion (had nothing to do with virginity as it does [or does not!] now). The white gown often served a double purpose after all, though as it was refashioned into the babies’ baptism gown.
It was terribly impractical to have a white wedding dress on the plains during the time of homesteading as there was nothing but dirt everywhere. People lived in sod houses (no trees available to make houses on the prairie) and the land was tilled for crops. There were no lawns.
Anyway, most often the bride’s gown was simply the best dress she had, whether the wedding was hurried or not.
That’s true, Stephanie, most brides didn’t necessarily wear white on the prairie, though the more fashionable brides would often wear white in the East. But like you said, their “best dress” was most often worn for the wedding. Still, the fashion plates of the era did show white wedding gowns during the 1880s, so perhaps it was just an ideal.
Thanks for the comment!
i loved Laura and Nellie (= we watched every episode from the first to very last i love that they have mary’s wedding ( but she did not get married in the books )
I would love to know where to find a pattern for the dress laura wore in the episode ‘sweet sixteen’ or at least a pattern similar to it-especially for the top part of it
Which one were you referring to, Anna? The reddish brown dress with the stand up collar? Because that dress’s bodice would be very simple to recreate with a basic princess seamed pattern.
Happy sewing!
Yes,that is the one. And thanks for the idea – I am going to attempt to make one. :)Trying to find colors to match is a little hard.But im trying to be patient until I find just the right colors.
That sounds great, Anna! The particular gown you’re referring to is one of my favorite Little House costumes, especially with the piping trim and classic 1880s overskirt. I’d love to see what you come up with!
Happy sewing,
Katrina
I am a huge fan. I love Laura and nellies dresses. I want to be Laura next Halloween I m online searching for a dress . Thank you for sharing this
Hello Gina, Glad to hear you liked it! Laura Ingalls is a fabulous person to dress up as.
Happy sewing,
Katrina
[…] To see nearly every other wedding dress ever worn on the Little House series you can read my post here. […]
You know that red dress with the white apron bib in season six? Well, I keep looking it up, and can’t find it anywhere. I would like to know the pattern for it, please. As I would like to make one. And Melissa, I am named after Laura ingalls wilder, so it doesn’t help that I like the books, and I get teased, being called Little Laura at school
Hi, Laura! How neat that you share the same name as the famous author. Yes, of course I know which costume you’re talking about. 🙂 I’ve never seen a dress pattern quite that plain, but the apron could be made quite easily out of the Butterick “Making History” pattern with a few simple adjustments! The thing that isn’t historically accurate about Laura’s red dress is that by the time she was fifteen she had already been wearing skirt down to her ankles for three years or so. Moreover, the bodices a young lady wore in the early 1880s would have been completely fitted (not loose like the television costume), and would have had high collars, not round faced necklines.
All that to say, that’s probably why you can’t find a costume pattern like that – because such a dress wouldn’t have existed back then! But since the design is so simple, you might be able to dream up a pattern yourself by combining a basic, button front bodice pattern with a straightforward rectangular skirt pattern.
Hope this helps!
Katrina