Jaffrey Center

Novelist Willa Cather came to Jaffrey Center in 1919 and stayed in the Shattuck Inn, which now stands empty on Old Meeting House Road. Not far from here, she pitched the tent in which she wrote several chapters of My Ántonia. She returned nearly every summer thereafter until her death and was buried in the Old Burying Ground, which also contains the remains of Amos Fortune, a former slave who bought his freedom in 1863 and moved to town when he was 71. Fortune, who was a tanner, also bought the freedom of his two wives. He died at the age of 91.