Experience Willa Cather's Red Cloud
Experience Willa Cather's Red Cloud
Walk in her footsteps. Stay in her town.
"I'm not exaggerating, Carrie, when I confide to you that I would rather go home to Red Cloud than to any of the beautiful cities in Europe where I used to love to go . . ."
-Willa Cather in a letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood
Red Cloud, Nebraska is not just a destination. It’s a place where literature and culture merge with the pleasures of a quiet country town and its prairie surroundings. To visit Red Cloud is to experience a town and entire landscapes, largely unchanged, as world-famous author Willa Cather knew them as a young girl and throughout her life. Red Cloud is a rural town of 1,000 people far from any city or suburban sprawl. It is a welcoming and friendly spot to pause and refresh or entirely regroup away from it all. Red Cloud is an oasis on the prairie — yet only a short scenic drive between two major Federal Interstates while at the crossroads of two state highways (one a designated scenic byway), both their own direct but tranquil journeys.
Stop first at the National Willa Cather Center — an arts and cultural hub in a commercial “Main Street” (that’s Webster Street to us) with original store fronts and historic architecture preserved and revitalized with new businesses. Here is the Red Cloud Opera House, the place of Cather’s arts immersion and education as a child, restored and open today with events and performances throughout the year. Our Special Collections & Archives hold some of the priceless treasures of a literary life and with the recent addition of over 8,000 documents and artifacts related to Willa Cather. Our Red Cloud Opera House Gallery hosts exhibits throughout the year while our permanent exhibit space details the life of Willa Cather in American Bittersweet. Our bookstore features books by and related to Willa Cather alongside other unique and curated gift items and welcomes authors for book talks and signings.
Willa Cather’s literary legacy is at one with the very soul of the places that so inspired her brilliant career — and still here, over 100 years later, for all to visit. Here is a place where you can experience the very buildings and landscapes that Willa Cather wrote about or lived in — whether it is her childhood bedroom and its original wallpaper (in The Song of the Lark) or the Miner House that became the Harling home in My Ántonia. Several different guided tour options include the Willa Cather Childhood Home, a National Historic Landmark, and a 7-building tour, All tours depart from the National Willa Cather Center which preserves and maintains these special places for the enjoyment of all today.
Outside of town, in Webster County, there are miles of prairie and more Cather-infused destinations, churches, and houses that await discovery on our Country Tour. Among them is the Pavelka Farm which shaped the descriptive farmstead and beautiful conclusion of My Ántonia. The 612 acre Willa Cather Memorial Prairie on the Nebraska-Kansas border preserves untouched prairie land as Cather would have known it and provides home to flora and fauna, and a few wandering cows. Here you can witness unique sunrises and sunsets, varied weatherscapes, or the deep and immense pageant of the night sky. Take a walk (and bring a picnic) amidst the great ocean of land that rolls around you. Listen only to the sound of the wind and the larks or the gentle murmur of cattle — or just the sound of absolutely nothing in the virtual center of the lower 48-states.
Whether you are planning a book group excursion, family vacation, or a quiet writer’s retreat, we invite you to spend a quiet evening at the Cather Second Home. You may rent the room that was Cather's, or the rooms of her parents and siblings. At the conclusion of your stay, you will be inspired and leave refreshed — just as Willa Cather did throughout her lifetime when she was, in her own words, “always being pulled back into Nebraska.” You will be, too.
