WILLA CATHER
Old Burying Ground
Jaffrey, New Hampshire
By Catherine Seiberling Pond
In her first known correspondence from Jaffrey, New Hampshire, Willa Cather wrote to her brother Roscoe on a postcard from the Shattuck Inn, “I am working well in this lovely country.” It was 1917, and the acclaimed writer was 43 years old, mid-career, and making revisions to her novel, My Ántonia.
For her first few stays, Cather often wrote in a large canvas tent in the lower pasture of “High Mowing,” a nearby summer home. I first heard about Cather’s tent retreats and her association with the farm in the late 1970s from my best friend’s mother, an English professor and owner of the property for twenty-five years. I had recently read O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, both novels inspired by the Nebraska prairie and Cather’s childhood home of Red Cloud, over 1,500 miles from Jaffrey.
Over the next three decades, Cather spent part of many years at “this quiet hotel in the woods,” as she described it in one letter, often with her partner, Edith Lewis. The sublime and solitary presence of Mount Monadnock loomed just to the west of the inn, and mornings of writing were followed by long walks in the afternoon. Cather’s time in Jaffrey was restorative and a needed place of “happy solitude” for her writing. Here she was able to work “in comfort and quiet” — something her busy and parallel life in New York seldom allowed.
In a 1945 letter to her brother Roscoe, Cather compared her rooms at a Maine inn where she was staying that summer with her teenage bedroom, still preserved in the Willa Cather Childhood Home in Red Cloud today, along with its original “rose bower” wallpaper. The room was also similar to her preferred third floor rooms at the Shattuck Inn:
“I have a funny little room in the attic here, with a sloping ceiling, like my ‘rose bower’ in our old first house. Do you remember? I can always work best in a low room under the roof. All my best books were written in Jaffrey N.H. in a little room where I could almost touch the ceiling with my hand.”
Cather wrote to Eleanor Shattuck Austermann only three months before her death, in January 1947. She had not been to Jaffrey for many years because of family illness and loss, but hoped to “drift back to the Shattuck Inn again,” which was not to be: “But I have never found any place where I could work in such peace and happiness as in the little rooms up in the top of the Shattuck Inn,” she wrote, “and I have often wished I were there…”
Cather once described being “homesick for New England” in the autumn, a trait that I share. Having spent much of my life in the region, it’s not hard to picture Jaffrey’s stunning foliage, or the invigorating air and azure skies of fall in New Hampshire — and the best sleeping weather of the year. Still, not everything is the same. The original Shattuck Inn has been torn down, though the Annex remains, now refurbished into condominiums.
A few years before Cather died, she wrote to a childhood friend that she was traveling to her “old resting place in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.” It would, indeed, become just that. After her death in 1947, she was buried at the Old Burying Ground behind the historic Jaffrey Meetinghouse. With availability always a question in the Colonial cemetery, her innkeeper friends, George and Eleanor Austermann, arranged for a plot near their own. No one knows exactly why Cather chose Jaffrey over Red Cloud, to where she often returned to visit dear family and friends, but I believe that her own letters reveal much of that answer. In 1972, Edith Lewis was buried alongside her — while she outlived Cather by twenty-five years, they had been together for almost forty.
The gravesite in the southwest corner is framed by white pines and an old stone wall. It is a place of pilgrimage for Cather enthusiasts — and for me, whenever I can return. Since we moved to Kentucky in 2008, I have often been homesick for my grandparents’ old Jaffrey farm, for the people and places of my childhood, and for the landscapes of New England. The Old Burying Ground, with its adjacent meetinghouse and classic village setting, provides sturdy mooring. Many family friends are also buried there, so visiting is now its own kind of homecoming.
The last time I stopped by Cather’s grave, I was on my way to visit my mother for what would be the last time before her death. It was autumn and the leaves were glowing, the air clear and intoxicating, and Mount Monadnock a comforting fixture against the bluest sky. Later I would learn that this was also Willa Cather’s favorite time to be in Jaffrey.
Other visitors leave small stones, flowers, even jewelry, and ponder the words on her granite headstone: “The truth and charity of her great spirit will live on in the work which is her enduring gift to her country and all its people.” Cather’s writing is deeply connected to both the people she loved and the places where she lived and wrote. For me, it will forever illuminate the wonder of our collective human experience, starting with my first reading of My Ántonia and continuing into the cosmos with a quotation from it inscribed near the base of her headstone: “…that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
We can only speculate, but the answer may be in the very passage from the novel that Cather edited on her first visit to Jaffrey thirty years before. Perhaps she just wanted to be buried in the place where she felt she had done her best work.
Catherine Seiberling Pond has written for Old-House Interiors, Victoria, Yankee, Literary Hub, and Rethink:Rural. She earned her master’s in historic preservation studies from Boston University and has been marketing coordinator for the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska, since 2018, the centenary celebration of My Ántonia. She works remotely from her farm in Kentucky and is writing a memoir about family farms and homeplaces. After the past year, she will again welcome semi-annual trips across the prairie to Red Cloud and hopefully another pilgrimage to New Hampshire.
Photo courtesy of the National Willa Cather Center.
Willa Cather Special Edition
Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!
Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.
Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.
Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory
