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:
“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were.... A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other.... In age we lose everything; even the power to love.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)