BY: PAUL HAMMEL
LINCOLN — A grassroots effort to save the crumbling Virginia birthplace of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather appears to have succeeded.
A Virginia realtor, Katherine Solenberger, has purchased the house to spare it from demolition, and she intends to donate it to a nonprofit within a year or so, according to Ashley Olson, executive director of the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska.
The organization had been seeking donations and benefactors to save the structure after it was announced last month that the home, and surrounding acreage, was going up for sale.
More than $30,000 donated
Olson said publicity about the impending sale generated more than $30,000 in donations toward a purchase, as well as the offer by the local realtor.
“We are looking forward to working with a nonprofit collaborator to deploy these funds for the stabilization and preservation effort,” Olson said Tuesday.
“In Cather’s sesquicentennial year, it is wonderful to see her legacy embraced in Virginia,” she added.
Cather was born Dec. 7, 1873, in the white, clapboard home that sits along a turnpike near Gore, Virginia.
But the home, which has been vacant since the 1970s, has fallen into disrepair in recent years. It has been deemed unsafe for visitors because of its broken windows, rusty metal roofing and sagging front porch.
Olson said the Cather organization was connected with Solenberger via local Cather fans and members of the author’s family who live in the area.
A series of events is planned this year to celebration the 150th anniversary of Cather’s birth.
Family moved to Nebraska
Cather’s family moved to Nebraska when she was 9 years old, but her birthplace figured into some of her writings.
The birthplace has been on the Register of Historic Places since 1978. The owner lived in a second house on the premises and used the Cather birthplace as an office and writing studio.
But the former owner, Charles T. Brill Jr., who recently died, rebuffed an effort a few years ago to sell the property to a group that included some Cather descendants.