Willa Cather at Home

Great American author, Willa Cather

When Willa Cather was 68 years old, she visited her birth- and childhood- homes in Gore, Virginia, which is located about 80 miles west of Washington, DC.  This was her last visit to Virginia, for she died only six years later.  She was gathering information to write her last and most personal novel, “Sapphira and the Slave Girl,” which takes place on “Back Creek,” an actual place near the two homes where Cather spent the first nine years of her life before the family moved to Nebraska.      

“The great disadvantage about writing of the places you love is that you lose your beloved places forever – that is, if you are a quiet person who doesn’t like publicity.” She wrote this in a letter to woman named Miss Masterton, who had written Cather a ‘fan letter’ praising the latest novel about a jealous landowner named Sapphira and a beautiful slave girl named Nancy.  (This quiet and very private person’s letters have been published expressly against her wishes in a book called “The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.”  The editors state that the “statute of limitations” has expired and that she is now part of our cultural history.)  Cather continues in the same letter:   

“I have not been back to Virginia since Sapphira was published . . . Such simple, honest, earnest people live there.  It would have been the same forever if motor cars had never been invented . . . It was the most beautiful piece of country road that I have ever found anywhere in the world.  I never found anything in the Swiss or Italian Alps so beautiful as that road once was.”  

Apparently, Miss Masterton had taken a visit to Virginia to trace the steps outlined in the novel.  “I seem fated to send people on journeys,” she remarks to Miss Masterton, and then proceeds to tell her about other readers who have similarly gone “a-journeying” to such places as Quebec and New Mexico, based on her books.  She tells her that the slave girl, Nancy, is a real person, and that the story is based on an event that actually happened.  “She was exactly like that, and old Till was just like that.  I was between five and six years old . . . “ – but Cather seems apologetic in the letter when she refers to the house called “Willow Shade” where she lived from ages 2 to 9:

Cather's home from ages 2 to 9

“I am sorry you saw that desolate ruin which forty years ago was such a beautiful place, with its six great willow trees, beautiful lawn, and the full running creek with its rustic bridge.  It was turned into a tenement house long since, and five years ago the very sight of it made me shiver.  Of course, it still lives in my mind, just as that March day when Nancy came back still lives in my mind.”

Cather would perhaps be happy to know that Willow Shade, 70 years hence, is privately owned by a non-Cather family who reside there and have restored it to historic standards – (though she was not to know that the house served as a hospital for a short while after it was a tenement house).

The very sight of it made me shiver . . . That is the one phrase in this letter that stays in my mind as I stand before the other home, that is, the birth home of Willa Cather.  I have come here for the last five years or so, on a sort of annual pilgrimage (yes, Miss Cather, you send me a-journeying too!) – and why? – I suppose to observe the slow deterioration of the birth home of this favorite author of mine before it is gone forever – sharing my private condolences with her each time I stand in the front yard where I imagine this great American author might have taken her first steps in life . . .       

Willa Cather's birth home today

The decrepit condition of her birth home would undoubtedly cause Willa Cather to shiver profusely.  She most likely stayed in this home whenever she came to visit Virginia, for it was owned at the time by Cather relatives.  In this home, in the years preceding the writing of Sapphira, I imagine she acquired both the inspiration and material for her final novel.   She made no comment about this house in any of her letters that I have read so far, most probably because it was well tended at the time and she had no concern or need to make comment.       

The home today is taken over by termites and neglect.  Once lived in by Cather relatives, the home has been abandoned for decades and is for sale by the current owner who would love to see it preserved but does not have the resources or ability to do so himself.  Unfortunately, neither the State of Virginia nor the literary scholars of our nation, nor the Willa Cather Foundation of Red Cloud, Nebraska has shown any interest in preserving this historic landmark – though a very nice sign in the front yard proclaims it a noteworthy spot.  And so, I stop by the house each spring to linger and wonder, take a few pictures of the changes I see, and then leave.      

While scholars busy themselves to publish private letters that the author had expressly stated should never be published, the author’s own birth home – located near “the most beautiful piece of country road . . . in the world,” amongst a people she said were the most honest and earnest – is sadly given over to termites and the next big storm that deems to take it down.  We should all shiver to know this.

I imagine Willa Cather taking her first steps here

Did she gaze out this window while imagining Sapphira?