The following cache is NOT at the posted coordinates. Please read the article and solve the puzzle to find the actual coordinates.
This cache is in the Women in History series started by MAMD. Recently while visiting my in-laws, Ilearned that author Willa Cather, best known for her novels about life in the midwest, had connections with Jaffrey NH in her final years. So I arranged to place this WIH series in Jaffrey.
Willa Sibert Cather, December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947, was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prive for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I. In 2023, a statue of Willa Cather was placed in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, one of the statues from the State of Nebraska.
Willa Cather and her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The family later settled in the town of Red Cloud. Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Cather moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33, she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She spent the last 39 years of herlife with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, before being diagnosed with breast cancer and dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. Lewis is buried beside her in a Jaffrey, NH plot.
(from Willa Cather, North by Northeast, https://cather.unl.edu/community/tours/jaffrey)
Willa Cather came to Jaffrey, New Hampshire for the first time in 1917. While visiting her friends Isabelle and Jan Hambourg at the Shattuck Inn early that summer, Cather discovered a place that would become, as Edith Lewis notes, "the one she found best to work in." She settled into two rooms on the third floor of the inn where, from the windows of the end room, she had a view of Mount Monadnock and the surrounding woods and pastures.
Two Pittsburgh friends who were renting a farm called High Mowing (not far from the Shattuck Inn) that same summer pitched a tent in their meadow, where Cather spent her working hours. It was in this earth-floored tent, containing only a table and camp chair—as Cather would describe years later in a letter to Harrison Blaine, the son of the owner of High Mowing—that she wrote much of My Ántonia. The following summer and fall Cather returned to Jaffrey, taking the same two rooms at the Shattuck Inn. By then My Ántonia was in galleys, which she and Edith Lewis read together, sitting against rocks in the woods near the inn.
Cather would return to Jaffrey many times after those first two summers, usually from mid-September to late November in order to avoid the summer crowds. After her cottage was built on the island of Grand Manan, Cather would stop in Jaffrey for a few weeks before returning to her apartment in New York each fall. After the devastating hurricane of 1938, which destroyed the woods behind the Shattuck Inn, she returned to Jaffrey less often.
Among the friends Cather made in Jaffrey was Dr. Frederick Sweeney. During the fall of 1919, while writing One of Ours in her tent at High Mowing, Cather became ill with the flu. While Dr. Sweeney was treating her, Cather discovered that he had been a medical officer on a troop ship bound for France, and that he had kept a diary. According to Dr. Sweeney's daughter Dorothy Sweeney, he initially refused Cather's request to read his personal accounts of the war. But Cather was persistent, and he eventually consented. Many of the details in Dr. Sweeney's record of an influenza outbreak aboard ship would later inform Cather's shipboard scenes in One of Ours.
Before her death in 1947, Cather requested that she be buried in the Old Burying Ground behind the Meeting House in Jaffrey. Edith Lewis, with the help of the Austermanns (daughter and son-in-law of the Shattucks), made the arrangements. Cather's simple gravestone sits near a wooded area on the edge of the cemetery near clusters of rhododendron bushes.
AFTER READING THE ARTICLE, SOLVE FOR N42 49.ABC W72 03.DEF TO DETERMINE THE FINAL COORDINATES
A and B: Willa spent the last BA years of her life with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis.
C: Willa was born on December C, 1873
D: Number of letters in Willa's middle name
E: The hurricane which destroyed the woods behind the Shattuck Inn was in 193E.
F: Willa and her family first moved to Nebraska when Willa was F years old.
DETAILS ABOUT THE CACHE:
Coming from Jaffrey Center, park in the large lot on Dublin Road across the street from the golf course and Dublin Taproom. The cache is just a short distance from parking.
Thanks to the Shattuck Golf Course for giving me permission to hide this cache on their property. Please be stealthy if the place is busy. Diagonally across the street the sprawling house is a replica of the old Shattuck Inn, which was destroyed in 1996. Enjoy the nearby views of Mt. Monadnock if the day is clear. In winter you can bring your XC skis or snowshoes and enjoy groomed loops around the golf course free of charge.