Willa Cather Memorial Prairie

Prairie this size does not keep itself. The Nature Conservancy deeded this land to the Willa Cather Foundation in 2006. With Nebraska Environmental Trust money, the Foundation cleared more than 6,000 non-native trees, fenced the springs and cut trails, and on April 18 and 19, 2009, burned 200 acres with the Red Cloud Volunteer Fire Department, the first prescribed fire here in more than fifteen years. Cattle went onto the new growth weeks later, fire and grazing together meant to vary the cover for plants and wildlife.

What the plaque says

Willa Cather Memorial Prairie Willa Cather first came to Webster County from Virginia in 1883 at the age of nine. The vast open prairies of Nebraska made a lasting impression on her. "This country was mostly wild pasture and as naked as the back of your hand. I was little and homesick and lonely and my mother was homesick and nobody paid any attention to us. So the country and I had it out together and by the end of the first autumn, that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake." Her life task became portraying how the pioneers tamed the wild land. The 610 acre Willa Cather Memorial Prairie preserves an example of the native grassland that once covered Nebraska. Throughout the summer, numerous wildflowers grow amid tall native grasses in an ever changing display of color. Here life typical of the prairie flourishes as it did before the first settlers came. The prairie was purchased by The Nature Con- servancy with a grant from the Woods Charitable Fund, Inc., of Lincoln, Nebraska. The Nature Conservancy Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Willa Cather Memorial Prairie — steps away
  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.
• National Willa Cather Center — 5.9 mi
  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.
• Home on the Range Cabin — 24 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

• Burlington Depot — 5.1 mi
• St. Juliana Falconieri Catholic Church — 5.3 mi
• Cather Childhood Home — 5.8 mi
• Red Cloud, 1871-1971 — 5.8 mi