Cather Childhood Home

Cather's bedroom was the attic of this story-and-a-half house, much like the room she gave Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark. She is believed to have hung its rose-patterned wallpaper herself, taking the paper as pay for work at Dr. Cook's drug store, and the Foundation says the same paper is still there. Mildred and Dr. Wilbur Bennett bought the house in 1960 and opened it for tours in 1967. A restoration of nearly $1 million, helped by a $415,000 Save America's Treasures grant, ended in a 2024 rededication.

What the plaque says

Cather Childhood Home Built ca. 1879, this is the house in which Willa Cather lived from 1884 to 1890. She describes it in "Old Mrs. Harris," in "The Best Years," and in this quotation from Song of the Lark: "They turned into another street and saw before them lighted windows; a low story- and-a-half house, 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." Restored and donated by the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation. Administered by the Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Willa Cather Center — steps away
  The restored Moon Block on Red Cloud's Webster Street, home of the Willa Cather Foundation, with the town she grew up in and wrote about laid out around it.
• Willa Cather Memorial Prairie — 5.8 mi
  Six hundred and twelve acres of never-plowed mixed-grass prairie south of Red Cloud, once Kitkehahki Pawnee country, named for the writer who said the grass was the country.
• Home on the Range Cabin — 26 mi
  Dr. Brewster Higley's 1872 homestead cabin on West Beaver Creek in Smith County, where he wrote the poem that became Home on the Range, kept on its ground by a farm couple who would not sell it.

More markers nearby

• Red Cloud, 1871-1971 — steps away
• Grace Episcopal Church — 0.2 mi
• Webster County, 1871-1971 — 0.2 mi
• St. Juliana Falconieri Catholic Church — 0.5 mi