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:
“Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what’s sensible and what’s foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“... in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him.... We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”
—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)