Annotations from the Archive

Modern representations of a Victorian Christmas are certainly beautiful, but for much of Webster County during Willa Cather’s childhood, holiday celebrations were more modest. A peek into the archives helped to develop our 2024 holiday tours and suggest the ways the Cathers might have observed Christmas at home and with their neighbors.

On November 11, we’ll honor our nation’s fallen soldiers on Veteran’s Day, the 70th year that the United States has commemorated the sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of young men and women in military conflicts. Willa Cather would have known November 11 as Armistice Day, a day when the veterans of World War I were honored, and our collections are rich with museum and archival items that further our understanding of the World War I experience and Cather’s depictions of it in One of Ours.

October is American Archives Month, and as we kick off our My Ántonia Big Read activities, we look back at the way our archives have shaped how we read and talk about the novel!

This week, the Red Cloud Chief ended its 150 year publication run. Through its pages, we came to learn much of what we know about Webster County history and Willa Cather's place in it.

The collections and archives at the National Willa Cather Center have always, since our founding, played a critical role in helping our visitors gain a deeper understanding of Willa Cather. Our museum's collections rotate through our historic sites, providing context and helping readers, teachers, and students to imagine the settings of Cather’s many works set in Red Cloud.

Red Cloud's historic Burlington Depot, in service for more than sixty years before it was decommissioned by the railroad, connected Red Cloud to the larger world. The technologies and processes that enabled such a connection were managed by dozens of men (and a handful of women) under the watchful eye of the station master. We hope the new interpretation at the Depot will give visitors a glimpse of daily life at the station.

The Cather Family Library, as it has come to be called in the last decade or more, is another part of the National Willa Cather Center’s collection of books associated with the extended Cather family. The Cather Family Library, however, provides especially rich insights into the mind and imagination of Willa Cather. A number of books in the collection contain personalization that denotes a book belonged to Willa Cather personally, who sometimes used "Willie" or "William" when marking her copies.

The National Willa Cather Center’s archives contain numerous book collections, and scattered throughout them are some of our most precious and valuable archival objects: our association copies. Coming from many different collections, our association copies help us—and by extension, Cather readers and researchers—understand Willa Cather’s relationships with her readers, her family and social networks, and the larger literary and publishing world.

The reopening of the Willa Cather Childhood Home this month is the culmination of more than two years of planning, research, and parallel work on both the house itself and the collections that have been housed within it since the 1960s. BVH Architecture assembled an excellent team to examine the long history of the home, which was built in 1879 and has undergone many changes in the past 145 years; the team utilized many resources from our archive to search for clues about how the house was constructed, updated, and used over the years.

In the 1910s and 1920s, Willa Cather made several trips to New Mexico, sometimes staying for weeks as she visited friends and relatives, traveling both for pleasure and for research. In the spring of 1926, Cather was reviewing the proofs of My Mortal Enemy and at the same time, finishing the writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop; the novel was slated for serial publication in The Forum beginning in January 1927 and as a Knopf book the following September.