Cather House

On a corner lot in Red Cloud, Nebraska, behind a white picket fence, stands the house Willa Cather grew up in. It's a plain, L-shaped clapboard house, a story and a half tall, at Third Avenue and Cedar Street. Cather lived here from 1884 to 1890, and the house is a National Historic Landmark.

The house

It was finished in 1878 as a simple rectangle. Not long after, a rear section was added that juts out to the north, and that gave the house the shape it still has.

The house went on the National Register of Historic Places on April 16, 1969. It was designated a National Historic Landmark on November 11, 1971.

Cather's years here

Cather lived here from age eleven until she left for the state university at seventeen. In a 1921 interview she said the years from eight to fifteen are "the formative period in a writer's life," when a writer unconsciously gathers basic material.

She put this house into her fiction in close detail. It shows up in two later short stories, "Old Mrs. Harris" and "The Best Years," and before them in The Song of the Lark, published in 1915.

The town and the prairie around it fed her novels too. People and places she remembered from Red Cloud became raw material for O Pioneers! and My Antonia.

After she left

Some time after Cather left Red Cloud, her parents moved to a different house. She kept coming back anyway. As long as her parents lived, she returned every year for a month or two in summer or fall, often with shorter stays at Christmas, unless she was off on a long trip to Europe. So her tie to the town lasted most of her life, even if her tie to this particular house did not. She did most of her writing in the East. In Leon Edel's phrase, she chiseled her work from the life she had lived in Red Cloud.

Keeping it standing

In 2019 the house received a Save America's Treasures grant. The money paid for structural stabilization and for conserving historic wallpaper that Cather put up with her own hands.

Finding it

The Cather House is at the corner of Third Avenue and Cedar Street in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The Willa Cather Foundation manages it.