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, willa, cather and/or birthplace:
“A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, its better than a new one.”
—Willa Cather (18731947)
“Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.”
—Willa Cather (18731947)
“In most nineteenth-century cities, both large and small, more than 50 percentand often up to 75 percentof 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)