Red Cloud Nebraska

City · Webster County · County seat · Population 962 (2020 census) · ZIP 68970 · Founded 1872 · Peak population 1,856 (1920)

About Red Cloud

Red Cloud is the seat of Webster County, a city of 962 on a terrace above the Republican River, about 6 miles north of the Kansas line, where US 136 crosses US 281. Willa Cather grew up here, and the town is full of places from her life and novels, cared for by the Willa Cather Foundation. It has Webster County Community Hospital, Red Cloud Community Schools and the National Willa Cather Center.

History

Silas Garber and others took claims along Crooked Creek in 1870; Garber entered the town site that July, and a stockade went up in August. When Webster County was organized on April 19, 1871, at an election held in Garber's dugout, Red Cloud became the county seat, and it has never lost it. The town, named for the Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud, got its post office in January 1872, and Garber's plat was filed that November; Garber was governor of Nebraska from 1875 to 1879. The Burlington's line from Hastings reached Red Cloud in the winter of 1878–79, and in the 1880s the town was a division point with a roundhouse and shops. A horse-drawn streetcar ran from the depot to downtown from 1887 to 1917, and brick blocks such as the 1885 Opera House and the 1887 Moon Block replaced the first frame buildings.

Willa Cather, born in Virginia in December 1873, came to Webster County with her family in April 1883 and moved into Red Cloud in 1884, to the rented house at Third Avenue and Cedar Street. She graduated from Red Cloud High School in 1890 and left for the University of Nebraska, but the town and the Divide north of it run through her fiction: Red Cloud is Black Hawk in My Ántonia, the Miner family are its Harlings, and Silas and Lyra Garber are the Forresters of A Lost Lady. The Willa Cather Foundation was founded here in 1955, took back the Cather sites from the state in 2019, and opened the National Willa Cather Center in the restored Moon Block in 2017. The city peaked at 1,856 people in 1920. Control Data founder William C. Norris was born on a farm near Red Cloud in 1911; Flying Tigers ace Robert T. Smith and USS Arizona survivor Donald Stratton grew up here, and Populist congressman William A. McKeighan farmed nearby.

Things to see

The National Willa Cather Center, 413 N. Webster St., with the museum, archives and bookstore, and the restored 1885 Red Cloud Opera House · the Willa Cather Childhood Home, 241 N. Cedar St. (National Historic Landmark), restored in 2023 · the Farmers and Merchants Bank, 338 N. Webster St., built by Silas Garber in 1889 · the Miner House, 241 N. Seward St. · the 1897 Burlington Depot · Grace Episcopal Church, 546 N. Cedar St., with Cather's memorial windows · Hotel Garber, 346 N. Webster St., opened in 2025 · the Webster County Historical Museum, 721 W. 4th Ave., in a 1909 mansion (Tue–Sun 1–5, April–October) · the Auld Public Library, 537 N. Webster St. · the Starke Round Barn, about 4½ mi east on US 136 · the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, about 610 acres of never-plowed prairie about 5½ mi south on US 281 · Red Cloud Golf Course (9 holes) · the city pool and parks · Indian Creek WMA, just south of town · Street Car Days at the end of July