Traveling to History: Twenty Two
Frederick County, Virginia: Birthplace of Willa Cather and a Long-Forgotten Novel
By James F. Lee
Willa Cather in 1936. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Carl Van Vechten Collection, Library of Congress. {{PD US}}
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Willa Cather, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author best known for novels, such as My Antonia and O Pioneers, depicting hardscrabble life on the Great Plains. Cather’s family moved to Nebraska when she was nine years old, and Nebraskans still claim her as one of their own, but her roots are in Virginia. She was born in Frederick County in 1873, a fifth-generation Virginian.
“She left Virginia, but Virginia never left her,” said John Jacobs, a retired professor of American literature at Shenandoah University, echoing a popular sentiment.
Visitors to Frederick County interested in Cather can see some of the sites still around from her early years.
Willa Cather’s birthplace, near Gore, Virginia. Cather lived the first year of her life here.
(By Cecouchman - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25611156)
Her birthplace, near Gore, Virginia, about 10 miles west of Winchester, was owned by Cather’s maternal grandmother, Rachel Boak. Today, the house is vacant and in disrepair. Rotten clapboards gap over the front doorway, the standing seam metal roof is badly rusted, and dilapidated shutters hang askew. The western end of the two-story structure seems to sag as if collapsing under the weight of old age and neglect. Traffic from US 50 roars by just a few feet from the front door.
It is a sad testament to a great writer.
About a year after her birth, the Cather family moved a mile eastward to Willow Shade, a lovely Greek Revival-style home built in the 1850s, located on Back Creek, owned by her maternal great grandparents. This house has fared better than her birthplace. It is hard to catch a good look at it through the trees, but photos show a grand three-story, rectangular house with distinctive American bond brick work.
Across the third floor front are five large single window bays each with twelve panes, and behind is a two-story brick extension. A steep front stairway leads to the second-floor main entrance, the lower floor being a raised basement. It was quite a stately house for rural northern Virginia of the 1850s.
Willow Shade, located on U.S. 50 near Gore, Virginia. Willa Cather lived here from ages one to nine years. Today it is a private home. (Photo courtesy of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources)
Today, Willow Shade is a private home, located on U.S. 50. A plaque at a pullover on the road tells the story of the house and Cather’s connection to it.
An event occurred here in March 1879 that had a profound effect on Cather. From a third-floor window looking east toward the bend in the road, she watched a stagecoach stop outside her house. Alighting from the coach was Nancy Till, a formerly enslaved servant who had escaped bondage in 1856 through the help of Cather’s grandmother Boak, finding sanctuary in Canada. As Cather recalled years later, Nancy Till was dignified, poised, and Northern in her speech, which impressed young Willa greatly, the former enslaved servant now a free woman.
Hebron Baptist Church in Gore, Virginia. This church is featured in the novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather. (Photo by James F. Lee)
Nancy Till’s return to Willow Shade marked her first visit since escaping slavery. It was an opportunity for Nancy to see her mother who lived on the Cather property.
Cather never forgot Nancy Till’s story and returned to it later in her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), setting the action at Willow Shade, calling it the Back Creek estate in the book. It is through this novel that Cather revisits scenes from her own youth, both at Willow Shade and its environs, and at nearby Winchester.
In Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Nancy Till is a young, enslaved servant in the family of Henry and Sapphira Colbert, modeled on Cather’s maternal great grandparents Jacob and Ruhamah Seibert. Sapphira resents Nancy because of her husband’s genuine affection for the girl and sets in place a diabolical plan of revenge, inviting her husband’s ne’er-do-well nephew for an extended stay at the Back Creek estate, providing him the opportunity to rape Nancy.
Sapphira’s daughter, Rachael Blake (modeled after Rachel Boak), becomes aware of the threat to Nancy, and with the help of some of the enslaved people in the house, assists Nancy across the Potomac River and northward to Canada and freedom.
“The springhouse at the edge of Winchester. When Nancy Till’s mother saw this springhouse, she “felt she was back in the world again.” (Photo by James F. Lee)
It is a dark, pessimistic novel, perhaps reflective of the times with the coming war in Europe, and with the challenges of aging and loss that Cather was experiencing in her own life. And it reflects one of the worst horrors of enslaved women: the constant threat of sexual assault.
The book was a success in 1940 but is not widely read today. Cather had conflicting feelings about Virginia given its tragic past, which is perhaps why she waited until the end of her literary life to write it. As John Jacobs points out, it is germane to her family history, typifies the travesty of plantation life, and how the Civil War affected families.
Many of the locations on Sapphira and the Slave Girl are still around for visitors to see.
In one scene, Nancy Till’s mother, called Till in the book, imagines Nancy and Sapphira journeying to Winchester for Easter week, a journey that Till herself used to make. As she envisions it, Sapphira and Nancy travel in a horse-drawn coach laden with trunks, “along the big road that led to Winchester, [where] there were some sightly farmhouses...” Traveling by car today, the landscape is obviously greatly changed, but the rolling hills, farms, and meadows still evoke that long-ago time.
Continuing east on U.S. 50, one of the first things visitors see entering Winchester today is the brick springhouse on the edge of town. Whenever Nancy’s mother on her own journeys to Winchester saw that springhouse, she “felt she was back in the world again.”
Christ Church (Christ Episcopal Church) in Winchester, Virginia. This gothic-Revival-style church at the corner of Washington and Boscawen Streets is mentioned in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. (Photo by James F. Lee)
At the corner of Washington and Boscawen Streets, Christ Episcopal Church’s central tower soars skyward. Built in 1828, this Gothic-Revival building is notable by the pointed arches over the doors and windows, and its distinct vertical lines. In the novel, Henry and Sapphira Colbert were married here.
This was the fashionable part of town “where the quality lived.” Cather mentions homes with “porticos with tall columns” and houses of pale gray, almost blue, limestone that are still there today.
Another site in the novel still around is the Mt Hebron Baptist Church in Gore. Sapphira’s husband, Henry, visited this church while his wife was away in Winchester. Today, this tidy white-sided church with a stone foundation and small spire looks nothing like the description in the novel: “a forlorn, weather-boarded building with neither spire, nor bell…It looked like an abandoned factory left to the mercy of the weather.” If you are lucky enough to get inside, you can still see the choir loft described in the novel where the enslaved African Americans sang during church services.
Other extant sites briefly mentioned in the novel include Taylor Hotel, the Old Court House, and the Ashby grave in the Confederate Cemetery, all in the city of Winchester.
Sapphira and the Slave Girl ends with an Afterward in which Cather inserts herself in the story as a five-year-old character recreating the scene of Nancy Till’s return. Cather’s enduring childhood memory of Virginia lives on in her novel.
Jacob and Ruhamah Seibert were Willa Cather’s maternal great grandparents and the prototypes for Henry and Sapphira Colbert in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The portraits are housed in the Handley Library in Winchester, Virginia. (Photo courtesy of John Jacobs)
Source:
Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress.
