Willow Shade was the childhood home of the renowned American author, Willa Cather. The gaunt, Greek Revival house was built ca. 1853 for Cather’s grandfather, William Cather, and his wife Emily Ann Caroline Smith Cather, both descendants of early Frederick County settlers. After Willa Cather’s birth nearby in 1873, her Cather grandparents moved to Nebraska and turned Willow Shade over to her parents. There she lived until age nine when she and her parents also moved to Nebraska. In her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), Cather immortalized Willow Shade when she wrote: “The slats of the green window shutters rattled, the limp cordage of the great willow trees in the yard was whipped and tossed furiously by the wind. I had been put in my mother’s bed so that I could watch the turnpike, then a macadam road with a blue limestone facing.”