Famed author's Vashon Island barn is a cozy haven

"Some people come down the lane and just stare," said Judith Manerud Lawrence, sliding open the heavy wood door of her old red barn on Vashon Island.

A small woman with a big sense of hospitality, she'll invite unexpected visitors into the three-story barn tucked among towering firs.

It's not just the wood-plank beauty of the half-century-old barn that draws visitors. It's the history.

The barn once belonged to Betty MacDonald, the Washington state author beloved for "The Egg and I" and other folksy books, including her Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children's series. MacDonald's dedicated fans trickle in — from across North America, Europe and beyond — to follow in the author's footsteps in this peaceful corner of northeast Vashon.

MacDonald moved to the island in the early 1940s after leaving her husband and their Olympic Peninsula chicken farm, where she had grown to thoroughly dislike chickens and him.

With her two teenage daughters and second husband, she settled in a house just below the bluff-top barn and wrote the cheerful, chatty autobiographies and children's stories that catapulted her to fame, still enduring decades after her death in 1958.

"The Egg and I," her first book, told of her adventures as a young bride on the chicken farm near Chimacum, south of Port Townsend. It spawned a popular movie plus the Ma and Pa Kettle country-bumpkin film/TV characters.

A later work, "Onions in the Stew," told of the MacDonald family's life on Vashon, from crazy plumbing and sulky teenagers to trees falling and mud sliding across the milelong forest trail that, for the first few years, was the main access from the ferry dock to their house. (Parts of the trail, called the Bunker/Dolphin Point Trail, can still be walked, but the former MacDonald house is owned separately from the farm and not open to visitors.)

Barn stays

Some MacDonald fans wander down the gravel lane just to see the barn; others come to stay since Lawrence has converted parts of it into two suites. Each has a kitchenette, views over Puget Sound to Mount Rainier and bookcases stacked with everything from Dickens to thrillers and, of course, MacDonald's books. They aren't fancy, spick-and-span accommodations; they're cozy and rustic hideouts just a 15-minute ferry ride, yet a world away, from Seattle.

"I didn't come here originally because of MacDonald, although I grew up on the Ma and Pa Kettle stuff," said Lawrence, 60, whose West Seattle childhood home was just across the water. She came to Vashon for the rural life for herself and her children in 1975 after a divorce, buying the six-acre farm and barn that had been empty and neglected for years.

Yet fan letters simply addressed to "Betty MacDonald, Vashon Island, USA," kept finding their way to the farm. Lawrence began collecting MacDonald photos and letters and getting to know MacDonald's relatives. Ten years ago, after years of renovations, she opened the Betty MacDonald Farm for overnight visitors.

Lawrence hasn't gone overboard on MacDonald memorabilia. There's an old egg-weighing scale and a metal sculpture of a chicken in the barn's cavernous ground floor, where she makes and sells floral wreaths. What gives guests the real sense of MacDonald, however, are the scrapbooks of family letters and old photos that guests can look through, plus old and new editions (including copies for sale) of her books in various languages.

Poultry's legacy

MacDonald may have heartily disliked chickens, but they became her trademark and a good business. She filled the Vashon barn with chickens, selling their eggs on Vashon and in Seattle's Pike Place Market. But the daily dirty work was delegated to a caretaker, said Lawrence.

"The chicken manure would get shoved out there," said Lawrence, pointing to a loft door in the barn that opens to a hillside below. It made the soil so rich, said Lawrence, that "I can grow anything there."

Lawrence is an avid gardener who probably could grow anything anywhere. Striding through her soggy field on a blustery late-autumn day, in rubber boots and with braided hair tucked under a baseball cap, she's the picture of sturdy self-reliance.

With children grown and gone, Lawrence lives alone on the farm, running her little inn; growing vegetables in a big garden protected by a high fence from Vashon's voracious deer; babying orchids in her greenhouse; and tending rows of trees she's planted over the years, from Asian pear, walnut and apple to fir and cedar.

"Keep the diamonds. I like cedar," said Lawrence, whose woodworking shop — a must-have for the constant repairs the 1940s barn needs — is stacked with lumber. Outside under the eaves, a 30-foot-long firewood pile is meticulously organized by log size. "It's my Norwegian heritage," said Lawrence. "I like a good wood pile."

During a late November stay in the Loft suite, I made a little dent in Lawrence's wood pile, feeding logs into the woodstove as a storm thundered outside. I stayed toasty warm despite winds so fierce that the barn's timbers creaked and groaned like a ship in a storm.

I curled up on the couch, looking through MacDonald scrapbooks and reading her tales of her Vashon family life in "Onions in the Stew."

"There were times during that first long, dreary, wet, dark winter when I wondered what I had ever seen in this nasty little island," MacDonald wrote.

"Then one morning it was spring. The willows blew in the sunshine like freshly washed golden hair. The white hyacinths bloomed. The cherry trees were frothy with blossoms. We had our first steamed clams and fell in love with Vashon all over again."

Kristin Jackson is an editor and writer with the Seattle Times Travel section: 206-464-2271 or kjackson@seattletimes.com