The Willa Cather Birthplace, also known as the Rachel E. Boak House, is the site near Gore, Frederick County, Virginia, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather was born in 1873.
Built in the early 19th century by her great-grandfather Jacob Seibert, the house was added on to and remodeled in 1850. Cather's maternal grandmother Rachel E. Boak lived in the house at the time of her parents' marriage in 1872. The simple farmhouse was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
Cather and her parents lived in the house only about a year before they moved to nearby Willow Shade, also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1883 the family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Cather grew up.
Famous quotes containing the words willa cather, cather and/or birthplace:
“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don’t care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“If a joyous elephant should break forth into song, his lay would probably be very much like Whitman’s famous “Song of Myself.” It would have just about as much delicacy and deftness and discrimination.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“In most nineteenth-century cities, both large and small, more than 50 percent—and often up to 75 percent—of the residents in any given year were no longer there ten years later. People born in the twentieth century are much more likely to live near their birthplace than were people born in the nineteenth century.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)