Willa Cather’s Virginia

03/16/2026

🌼Springtime at Willow Shade, Willa's childhood home in Gore, Virginia- just one mile south of her Birthplace. (photo courtesy Jenn Pumphrey.)

02/06/2026

Thank you Mike Robinson and Wi******er Tales. This is wonderful information straight from Willa Cather!

A Letter from Willa Cather to T. Kenneth Wood, April 7, 1941....about her home in Gore, VA:

Dear Dr. Wood:

When I finished reading your kind letter, I wished that my father were still living and here to read it with me. Many of the places you mention, I do not remember, but he would have remembered all of them. I remember the Round Hill Church perfectly but had no idea that the head of the Opequon Creek was so near Round Hill. It was not with my grandfather, William Cather, that Henry Clay used to stop on his journeys, but with my great-grandfather, James Cather, who lived somewhere beyond Flint Ridge. Lena Gore's mother was a Campbell, not a Cather. Lena's father was the son of "Old Mother Gore," (Syndney Gore, who Gore is named after) who was a daughter of my great-grandfather, James Cather. The tough tavern I mentioned was near Hoag Creek, much nearer Wi******er than is the present post-office in Gore. A young engineer in Washington has written me that the denuded Double-S (a road that had two S turns up Timber Ridge) is finally to be blasted away and made a straight line. What a pity! I made a short motor trip through the valley three years ago, but when I passed my old home (Willow Shade), I turned my eyes away from it. Such ruin and desolation...it is sad to look upon. The old winding road from Gore up to Timber Ridge was one of the loveliest things in all Virginia.

Thank you for your good letter, I am
Gratefully and Cordially yours,
Willa Cather

12/08/2025

Good morning dear Friends!
On behalf Willa Cather's Virginia, we want to sincerely thank each of you that attended her Birthday Celebration at Westminster-Canterbury yesterday. Your presence means more than you know — because when we gather like this, we’re honoring a legacy, a story, and a woman whose work shaped American literature. Our speaker, Cather scholar Sallie Ketcham, gave a wonderful presentation on Willa's life and highlighted how she and the Cather family kept their Virginia roots alive while settling in Nebraska. Thank you Sallie for sharing your extensive knowledge with us!

As many of you know, the birthplace is in need of extensive restoration. It is a place of deep historical significance — not only to this community, but to our heritage as a whole. And today is about rallying together to ensure that this building, this piece of history, is preserved with the care and respect it deserves.

So today, we are humbly asking for your help.

There are a few ways you can support the restoration:

• First, through donations — every dollar truly makes a difference and goes directly toward restoration work.

• Second, by becoming a member of our grassroots team -"Friends of Willa Cather", who will work closely with Willa Cather's Virginia to promote the Birthplace Preservation Project and involve the local community in this endeavor.

Our goal today is not only to raise funds — but to nurture a sense of continued stewardship. This birthplace connects us to a woman who told the stories of this land, of ordinary people, and of the beauty found in simple beginnings. And now, it is our turn to protect the beginning of her story.

So again — thank you for your interest in this project, thank you for caring, and thank you in advance for any level of support you’re able to give. Together, we can make sure the Willa Cather Birthplace remains standing as a place of inspiration for generations to come.

Our address is:
Willa Cather’s Virginia
6856 Northwestern Pike
Gore, VA 22637

If you are interested in joining our "Friends of Willa Cather" please comment below and we will private message you for details.
Thank you again!

11/19/2025

11/11/2025

National Geographic Society was founded by Willa Cather relative from the Back Creek Valley, James Howard Gore.

11/11/2025

🎉 You’re Invited! 🎉
Join us for a special afternoon celebrating one of Virginia’s literary treasures — Willa Cather!

📚✨ Come enjoy a wonderful presentation, “Willa Cather the Virginian: Here, There, and Back Again” by renowned Cather scholar, Sallie Ketcham. Together, we’ll honor the life and legacy of this beloved author whose stories continue to inspire generations.

📅 Sunday, December 7th at 2 PM
📍 Shenandoah Valley Westminster Canterbury
300 Canterbury Dr., Wi******er, VA 22603
(No reservations necessary!)

🕊️ This event is free and open to all.
Donations to support the preservation of Willa Cather’s historic Virginia birthplace are greatly appreciated. You may contribute locally by check to Willa Cather's Virginia at this event. Or Online at willacather.org/birthplace or by scanning the QR code on the flyer below.

Let’s celebrate the lasting impact of Willa Cather’s words right here in her home state! 💐

10/24/2025

Willa Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, in 1873. When Cather was nine years old, her family moved to rural Webster County, Nebraska, and later to the town of Red Cloud, where she lived until attending college at the University of Nebraska. Cather’s career began in Pittsburgh, where she spent a decade working as a journalist and teacher. She later relocated to New York City, and by 1908 was the managing editor at McClure’s Magazine. After the publication of her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, Cather left the magazine to focus full-time on her own writing.
In subsequent decades Cather wrote prolifically. Her writing conveyed an intimate understanding of her characters in relation to their personal and cultural environments. While six of Cather’s novels were inspired by her Nebraska experiences, her writing encompasses settings that also include the desert Southwest, seventeenth century Quebec, and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, among others. Cather’s literature found national and international audiences, eventually being translated into more than forty languages. Widely celebrated for My Ántonia, Cather received the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. She won the William Dean Howells Medal for Death Comes for the Archbishop and the Prix Femina Américain for Shadows on the Rock. Cather was
the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Princeton University, and she appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1931. Modern readers continue to value Cather’s quietly nuanced characters, masterful language, and sensitive explorations of place. Her life and work still inspire insightful scholarly analysis. Willa Cather endures, not only as a “favorite daughter,” but as an author who elevated her formative experiences into an international literary legacy.
Cather died in 1947 and was laid to rest in the Old Burying Ground in Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire. Her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, selected her final resting place and designed her tombstone, which features these memorable words from My Ántonia: “that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

10/24/2025

Welcome to our new page Willa Cather’s Virginia!

Here is a little bit about our organization:

Willa Cather’s Virginia is based in Gore, Virginia, the first home of one of America’s greatest writers. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather (1873-1947) was a fifth generation Virginian, whose relatives aligned on opposing sides of the Civil War. Her fiction, although often set far from Virginia, deals again and again with issues and characters that are deeply involved with Virginia and the South. Cather was reared amidst the beauty of Back Creek Valley and later embraced the complexities of her Virginia birthplace—including the stories of those who inhabited what she described as “that out-of-the-way, thinly settled district between Romney and Wi******er.” Indeed, Cather’s final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), is set near her birthplace just a few miles northwest of Wi******er, in the traumatic decade preceding the Civil War. Through the restoration and revitalization of Willa Cather’s Birthplace, Willa Cather’s Virginia aims to widen and deepen members’ and visitors’ understanding of this place: its resources, issues, and stories—past and future.