Willa Cather's Virginia Birthplace

In the Back Creek Valley of Frederick County, Virginia, just north of Winchester, stands a log and frame farmhouse where one of America's greatest novelists was born on December seventh, eighteen seventy-three. Willa Cather spent the first nine years of her life in this valley, in a community of sheep farmers, orchardists, and Civil War veterans who had barely finished choosing sides. Then in eighteen eighty-three her family pulled up and moved to Nebraska, trading the settled Shenandoah foothills for the open grassland of the Great Plains.

That transplanting became the subject of her most celebrated novels: O Pioneers and My Antonia, works that took the immigrant experience on the frontier and turned it into literature of the first order. The farmhouse, owned by her great-grandfather, is on the National Register of Historic Places and is the oldest surviving landmark of a writer who spent her career looking back at her own American reinvention. Her great-grandfather Jacob Seibert owned the house, and the log section was probably built in the eighteen tens.

Her parents, Charles Cather and Virginia Boak, married there in December of eighteen seventy-two, and the family moved to nearby Willow Shade in eighteen seventy-four. A state marker links the old mill on Back Creek to her novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The house was listed on the National Register in nineteen seventy-eight, and when it was put up for sale in twenty twenty-three, family members and the Willa Cather Foundation raised money to save it.