National Willa Cather Center

Willa Cather's family left Virginia for rural Webster County in 1883, and late the next year they moved into Red Cloud, a young railroad town named for the Oglala leader. She lived here until 1890, when she left for the university in Lincoln, and she spent much of her working life writing about the place. It is Black Hawk in My Ántonia, and the heroine of that novel was drawn from Anna Pavelka, a Bohemian immigrant who worked as a hired girl to help her family and later raised ten children on a farm near Bladen.

The Willa Cather Foundation began in 1955 as a group of local volunteers led by Mildred Bennett. In 2017 it opened the National Willa Cather Center in the Moon Block, an 1887 commercial building on Webster Street, restored to hold a museum, an archive, a bookstore and a gallery, and it takes in the Red Cloud Opera House. The permanent exhibit is American Bittersweet: The Life and Writing of Willa Cather.

The center is where the tours start. The Foundation keeps ten properties in town and around the county, among them the childhood home on Cedar Street, where the family lived from 1885 and which became a National Historic Landmark in 1971, the Burlington depot, St. Juliana Falconieri and Grace Episcopal churches, the J. L. Miner house and the Pavelka farmstead. The childhood home tour takes about half an hour, and the guided historic sites tour about two hours by car.