Willa Cather’s renovated Nebraska childhood home about to reopen
LINCOLN, Neb. (Nebraska Examiner) – Visitors will soon get a new look at the cozy attic bedroom of Willa Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud, which carried a special place in the heart of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
The room, and the rest of the 1½-story frame home, will reopen to public tours Thursday after a $1.2 million renovation as part of a celebration of Cather’s 150th birthday.
The structure, Cather’s home from age 10 to 16, was closed 16 months ago for a comprehensive renovation that includes a more accessible entrance, museum lighting for enhanced interpretation, a climate control system and a new wooden-shingle roof and foundation.
The 143-year-old home, and especially Cather’s attic bedroom, are considered the “crown jewels” for visitors of the multiple historic sites in Red Cloud that are associated with the author.
The childhood home is mentioned in three of Cather’s books: “The Song of the Lark,” “Old Mrs. Harris” and “The Best Years.”
As the eldest of seven children, Cather was given the attic bedroom as a sort of a refuge from the bustling family in the small Red Cloud home.
The sloped ceiling, she once wrote, was “so low that a grown person could reach it with the palm of the hand.”
Cather’s sister, Jessica Cather Auld, said, “Willa’s door locked from the inside, and Willa used to go up there, lock her door and smoke. Since none of the adults, besides Bess, ever came upstairs, Willa was fairly safe.”
Later, as an adult, Willa Cather requested the same kind of intimate upper room when writing from the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and in the study of the summer cottage that she owned with Edith Lewis at Grand Manan, New Brunswick, the site of an informal colony of female writers and artists.
“I expect she liked to be cozy and above the fray — of a busy inn or household,” said Catherine Pond, a publicist for the National Willa Cather Center.
In 1940, Cather wrote to “Our Town” author Thornton Wilder about her Shattuck Inn workspace: “I always have there a little suite of rooms up under the roof, where there is a perfect quiet as I am surrounded by store rooms on all sides, and there are no overhead noises except the rain on the roof.”
Her 150th birthday on Thursday will be celebrated with cupcakes throughout the day, the reopening of the childhood home to tours, and a livestreamed virtual book launch and reading at 7 p.m. of a new book on the author, “Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather,” by Benjamin Taylor.
A new exhibit, on the history of Red Cloud, will be a part of tours Thursday and later during the holiday of historic sites in the community, which is south of Hastings along the Kansas border.
“This restoration is an undertaking we’ve dreamt about for more than a decade,” said Ashley Olson, the executive director of the Cather Center.
“We are beyond excited for visitors to see the changes and encounter family objects in an enhanced, accessible, and reinterpreted space,” Olson said.
The next step in the renovation is restoring the original wallpaper that Cather chose for her bedroom.
She got the rose-strewn wallpaper in trade for her work at Dr. Cook’s drugstore in Red Cloud, but over the years, the paper has faded.
Visitors to the home will get to view the restoration of the wallpaper in progress once that work resumes in March, officials said.
As part of the renovation, the exterior of the childhood home was repainted in a brown-toned historic palette that was confirmed as an original color after a careful paint analysis.
Cather and her family moved to Nebraska from Virginia in 1883, and the author lived in the Red Cloud home until 1896.
An effort is underway to restore Cather’s birthplace in Gore, Virginia, which had fallen into disrepair.
A Virginia real estate agent, Katherine Solenberger, purchased the house earlier this year to spare it from demolition and intends to donate it to a nonprofit to manage the property.
