Cather Country
The rolling prairies of Nebraska fired the imagination of a famous American writer.
By Dennis Drabelle | From Preservation | March/April 2006
In 1883, Willa Cather, then only nine years old, left Virginia with her family for the raw prairie of south-central Nebraska. Her paternal grandparents had already relocated there, and her parents, Charles and Jennie Cather, decided to do the same after a barn on their Virginia farm burned down—an "accident" that may have had something to do with the family's pro-Union sympathies. In her celebrated novel My Ántonia, Cather recalls her first impressions of Nebraska's blank frontier, through the mouthpiece of narrator Jim Burden: "There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made."
Cather took the material of this flat, stark terrain and created an enduring fictional country. A phrase William Faulkner used to describe his own work applies equally to Cather: She found herself as an artist after realizing that her "little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about." The town of Red Cloud, where the Cathers eventually settled, appears in much of the writer's fiction. In My Ántonia (1918), she calls the town Black Hawk. In O Pioneers! (1913), it's Hanover. In The Song of the Lark (1915), it's Moonstone—and so on, through half a dozen novels and several short stories. Along with the setting, Cather appropriated virtually the entire census roll, from her own self-effacing grandmother (the title character in the story "Old Mrs. Harris") to the local grandee and his restless wife (the Forresters in the 1923 novel A Lost Lady) to, above all others, the vibrant Bohemian immigrant who was the model for Ántonia.
Red Cloud today bears a strong resemblance to the place that Cather knew so well. Its citizens have preserved a portion of the rolling grassland that lured their homesteading forebears to the region. They've saved their late-19th-century downtown. They continue to live in houses built by their great-grandparents. And, with unusual zeal, they have held onto countless items owned by, used by, seen by, sat upon, or otherwise associated with the local girl who grew up to be one of America's best-known writers. In 1965, the Nebraska state legislature designated the western half of Webster County, including the sites associated with the writer, "Catherland." Recently I visited this not-so-little postage stamp of native soil to see how Cather's legacy is being preserved and rejuvenated.
The Cathers started out by farming the countryside, but after a year and a half, they moved to Red Cloud, where Charles went into business as a land agent. Now managed by the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation, the house where the Cathers lived, at Cedar and Third, looks much as Willa described it in The Song of the Lark: "a low story-and-a-half home, with a wing built on at the right and a kitchen addition at the back, everything a little on the slant—roofs, windows, and doors."
As Barb Kudrna shows me around, the usual tour-guide dynamic gets turned inside out. Most interpreters of vintage houses single out the few items that actually belonged to the original owners from the dozens more that are merely "of the period." But so many of these furnishings were the Cathers' that Kudrna need only mention those that weren't.
In the parlor, the family Bible lies open to the page on which Willa fudged her birthdate, making herself younger by three years. Her old highchair stands in a corner of the dining room, and the family's good china is stacked inside a cabinet built into a wall. Upstairs, beyond the long, low room where her siblings slept in beds lined up dormitory-style, is the aerie that became Willa's bedroom and reading nook; the walls still bear the roseate wallpaper mentioned in The Song of the Lark.
The most evocative thing of all, however, is not an artifact but a space, the "hideous, cluttered room" allotted to the eponymous heroine of "Old Mrs. Harris." Stuck between the dining room and the kitchen, it's less chamber than passageway, and was wide open to the foot traffic that must have gone on all day. With its stove and spindle bed, it's no longer hideous or cluttered—just exposed and devoid of charm. Its homeliness underscores the poignancy of a story about how older relatives—in this case, Willa's maternal grandmother—are dutifully taken in by their children and grandchildren only to be treated as afterthoughts, relics who "look into the eager, unseeing eyes of young people and feel themselves alone."
As the tour continues, what was first impressive—the presence of so much genuine Catheriana—begins to strain credulity. "How could all this have survived?" I ask Kudrna.
She explains that Cathers occupied the house for two decades, and that after the deaths of Charles and Jennie Cather, a careful record was kept as their belongings were sold. Willa was famous by then, having won a Pulitzer Prize for her fifth novel, One of Ours (1922), and relatives and friends saw the value of hanging on to or retrieving her possessions. Before her death in 1947, Willa herself sent various items (such as the caps and gowns she wore when receiving her honorary degrees) to her childhood friend Carrie Sherwood, who lived to 102 and acted as a consultant after the Nebraska State Historical Society bought the house.
"We're still getting stuff," Kudrna adds. "One of Willa's nieces passed away in Utah last year, and her people sent us a steamer trunk. Inside were a peacock cape, a turquoise dress, and a lace jacket, all owned by Willa." Like the Cathers themselves, their friends and neighbors seemed to have had a packrat mentality: They, too, have contributed to the outpouring of items associated with their favorite daughter.
Carrie Sherwood's maiden name was Miner, and our next stop is her family's house, just a block away. More ornate than the Cather place, this residence was built in 1879, in the Italianate style, with wooden fans rising and spreading from balustrades on the front porch. The Miners' house attracted all kinds of people, especially children. It was here that a Bohemian immigrant named Annie Sadelik came to work as a live-in maid, and it was almost certainly here that Willa met and was bowled over by this young woman, who later inspired the writer's best-known work.
My favorite Cather novel is not that book—My Ántonia—but rather A Lost Lady. Willa based its leading characters—a powerful banker and his "fast" wife—on Mr. and Mrs. Silas Garber, who went on to be governor and first lady of Nebraska. The bank that Silas Garber built and owned, the Farmers' and Merchants', still stands on Webster Street, Red Cloud's main drag, where by arrangement with the historical society, the building serves as the Cather foundation's museum and archives. With its mismatched halves, it's quite an edifice. It's as if two separate structures—one the tower of a baroque castle, the other a sober countinghouse—noticed that each was made of red stone and brick, came together, embraced, and remained in permanent union. Inside the former bank, an array of tellers' cages juts out like the burnished prow of an old ship. When the bank had to close in the panic of 1893, its customers must have been dumbfounded—who would have thought that this gleaming shrine to elegance and stability could fail?
Garber's hopes for Red Cloud weren't the only ones to be dashed. From a peak of 3,000 in the late 19th century, the population has dwindled to about 1,300. Recently, however, the number has leveled off. "Young people are leaving, but older people are moving into town from their farms," Kudrna explains. "Red Cloud is the county seat for Webster County. That and Willa Cather are what keep the place going." During my visit, the place kept going by day but closed down around suppertime. After dark, only the Palace Lounge, just off the cobblestone intersection, seemed to draw folks in off the prairie.
The foundation's official tour of Catherland falls into two parts: Red Cloud proper—which you can explore on foot, with or without a guide—and the surrounding countryside, which has to be seen by car. My guide for the rural phase is Ron Kort, whose wife, Betty, is the foundation's executive director. As we drive down arrow-straight country roads, it becomes clear that the structures in town were easier to save than outlying ones. The Cathers' farmhouse, where the family first lived upon moving to Nebraska, is gone. So is the dugout in which the Sadeliks first lived—a meager shelter carved out of the earth where the family rode out the unforgiving prairie winters. (The bleak conditions surely contributed to Annie's father's suicide, as they do to Mr. Shimerda's in My Ántonia.) All that stands on the site today is a sign marking the location of the Sadeliks' shelter.
But for me, these physical gaps are filled by Kort's familiarity with Cather lore. He grew up nearby, he tells me as we continue our drive, and he recalls his grandmother's story of going to the memorial service for Willa's cousin G.P. Cather, killed in World War I and the model for Claude Wheeler in One of Ours. Kort's people "couldn't get into the church," he says. "The service was so packed they had to sit out in the buggy." As a kid in the 1950s, Kort himself had an "Ántonia" sighting. "I was taken over to an uncle's house," he recalls. "He had married into the Pavelka family"—as had Annie Sadelik after having a baby out of wedlock; the event is fictionalized in My Ántonia and is pivotal to the novel—"and there was a visitor that day, a little old lady in a shawl. I have to say, I wasn't at all interested in her at the time. I cared a lot more about Mickey Mantle."
As we continue from farm to farm, with stops at various cemeteries in between, I'm struck by how far the homesteads were from each other and from town. "The Cathers were so far out," Kort says, "that Red Cloud must have been a bit of heaven for them."
For Willa, the most brilliant star in that bit of heaven was the opera house. It brought culture to Red Cloud, it was the site of her high school commencement speech in 1890, and it figures in The Song of the Lark as the venue where Thea Kronberg launches her singing career. After the opera house closed in the 1920s, long after Willa had decamped to Pittsburgh and then New York, she lamented its disuse on her visits home.
The Mohart family, which built the opera house in 1885 and owned it for more than a century, gave it to the Cather foundation in 1991. Thanks to that gift and a $1.7 million fundraising campaign, the opera house enjoyed a grand reopening in 2003. The ground floor now houses a Cather bookstore and the foundation's offices; the second floor has been restored to its original look, not excluding the load-bearing pillars that have always obstructed the view from a few seats. Shows like The Fantasticks and Steel Magnolias play there these days, and the portable chairs can be rearranged as needed.
While I was in town, the opera house hosted the Second Annual Emerging Writers of the Heartland Symposium. The aim of the symposium is to discover budding female writers from rural high schools in Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Nine finalists—chosen on the basis of submitted essays, poems, or short fiction—met to tour Cather country, share their work, and compete for cash awards. As the girls read aloud, a strong and most Cather-like theme emerged: the tension between an urge to charge out into the wide world and a reluctance to leave a hometown where everybody knows and fusses over you. Some of the girls had drawn inspiration from their visit to Red Cloud, and one of them, Staci Hogsett of Imperial, Neb., penned a phrase worthy of the great lady herself. To enter a Cather-related house, she said, was to go "back to the beginning of greatness."
Listening to the girls, I wondered if in one way Willa Cather's ability didn't surpass that of other regional writers. The South of Faulkner and Kate Chopin and Flannery O'Connor, for example, seems to have jumped onto the page already lush with grotesque characters, freighted symbols, and vivid local color. Cather's region wasn't—and isn't—like that. The people she grew up with were too busy eking out a living to be peculiar, and the countryside in which they toiled was bleak and formless. Cather's genius was to make flat, open-skied Nebraska sing with as full a throat as any other American place.
Dennis Drabelle is a contributing editor at The Washington Post Book World.
For more photos, stories, and tips, subscribe to the print edition of Preservation magazine.
Comments
Submitted by mona at: March 28, 2011
who were all of her siblings?