Travelers heading to Prince Edward Island to experience the transformative power of Anne’s and Maud’s landscapes will find, at first glance, a very different world from the one that they inhabited. A bridge and airport now make travel on and off island easy; cars cruise the roads at 60 miles per hour; and the commercial stretches, especially on the approach to Cavendish, can make Anne’s dreamy rural world seem lost in the distant past. Yet despite the obvious changes—large mechanized farm equipment instead of horse-drawn plows and wagons; brightly colored theme parks where crops once grew; paved roads in place of red-dirt lanes—the essential character of Prince Edward Island remains the same. The wave-etched cliffs along Cavendish Beach, the woods of fern-lined brooks and mossy stretches, the gently sloping fields with a sea of infinite blue just beyond greet the visitor as they did Anne Shirley, when arriving full of hope that here she would find the home where she might be wanted at last.
That Anne’s land is an island is a big reason for its enduring nature. About 140 miles long and 40 miles across at its widest, Prince Edward Island is defined as much by the sea as by its quiet inland beauty. Even when the ocean can’t be seen, its presence can be felt, providing a sense of both containment and separation for island residents. Dip down into a valley where the waters are invisible and the air is moist, the temperatures moderated, the breezes carrying hints of the sea’s smells and sounds. Wander to a hilltop or venture close to the shore and the cry of gulls, the lap of waves, and the creak of moored boats are as present as they were in Anne’s day. Or head to the shore where the Gulf Stream flows so near the coast that the summer waters are warm enough for swimming, the beaches inviting and long, and the slope of white and red sand dunes gentle enough to create a sense of an idyllic, unlikely northern island.
Before the bridge to the mainland was completed in 1997 (the longest in the world over water that freezes), travel on and off the island was by boat, though even the ice-breaking ferries couldn’t guarantee passage in the winter. This left the island, already at a considerable distance from major airports and commercial hubs, dependent on the natural resilience of its inhabitants. Farming and fishing persist as the economic mainstays (with Prince Edward Island oysters and potatoes enjoying far-flung reputations), while the beaches, golf courses, and popularity of Montgomery’s novels keep tourism an important, albeit seasonal, source of income.
On the surface, change on the island seems to have moved at the pace of Matthew’s buggy after collecting Anne at the train station for her first night at Green Gables. Electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones in private homes arrived later than on the mainland, while one-room schoolhouses for first through eighth grade continued into the 1970s.
The long rectangles of farmed land, outlined by tall dark spruces or pines, suggest a design that hasn’t changed since the original sixty-seven plots were drawn by Britain, after expelling the French Acadians in the late eighteenth century. Unfortunately, the lottery system they used to entice would-be settlers to the island drew speculators instead, beginning a long history of absentee owners. The resulting lack of local engagement caused considerable unrest, but it also meant little deviation from the original grids. It wasn’t until the Compulsory Land Purchase Act in 1873 that the distant landowners were forced to sell, a resolution that allowed Prince Edward Island to host—and then join—the Canadian Confederation of provinces. The historic conference, held in Charlottetown in 1864, gave rise to two of Prince Edward Island’s nicknames—“Birthplace of Confederation” and “Cradle of Confederation”—and to the names of significant local places, including the eight-mile-long Confederation Bridge; the 290-mile-long Confederation Trail, a bike path that runs the length of the island along the old railway lines; and the stunning Confederation Centre of the Arts in downtown Charlottetown.
Other changes to the island came more quickly. The precariousness of livelihoods, where winters are long, hard freezes and droughts can wipe out crops, and fishing open waters comes with all kinds of risks, prompted many islanders to head west in search of easier work and higher returns. The number of family-owned farms fell from roughly 10,000 at mid-century to closer to 1600 today, most of them consolidated into the large agribusinesses. At the same time, a big drop in traditional fish stocks (and the moratorium on cod that began in 1992) forced many families to give up their boats and find other work. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Maud Montgomery was writing her first novel, the population stood at about 100,000; during the Depression years, it dropped to a low of about 86,000 but has since risen to roughly 140,000 today.
Accompanying these changes are those that reveal the adaptability of the islanders. Many areas were converted to blueberries, a popular cash crop, while the sheltered bays began to fill with new forms of aquaculture, primarily oyster and mussel farms, which are visible as lines of black buoys that float atop long mesh tubes, each filled with hundreds of the tiny young bivalves.
The Literary and Village Improvement Societies of Anne’s day, along with the concerts and church socials, have given way to music festivals, summer theater, and the popular ceilidhs (pronounced kay-lees) or “kitchen parties” of Celtic music and dance. Craftspeople continue to find new niches for their work, and farmer’s markets bring together growers and consumers interested in the value-added products that allow the smaller farms to survive.
Similar changes have taken place on the land itself, where abandoned farms gave way to weeds; shrubs and orchards disappeared into the scrub; and trees grow old and die or are harvested for timber, as happened to the original Haunted Wood and to Idlewild, site of Anne and Diana Barry’s playhouse (“Mr. Bell having ruthlessly cut down the little circle of trees in his back pasture in the spring”). Lupine, a tall multi-hued roadside flower, arrived after Montgomery’s first novel was published; its spires of blossoms now provide an array of summer color, while its presence has become ubiquitous on Prince Edward Island photos and postcards.
Silver foxes were raised for their furs on the island in the mid-nineteenth century; many escaped and have thrived in the wild.
By 1900, most of the original forests were gone, along with many of the large mammals that once inhabited them, including black bear, caribou, and moose. (Deer never established themselves on the island, though coyotes have recently arrived, presumably crossing over from the mainland when the straits were covered in ice.) In a reversal of the earlier land-clearing trend, about half of the island is forested today, much of it in trees that are often young and evenly aged. On a walk through the woods, it’s not unusual to find daylilies and lilacs that mark an abandoned homestead, and apple trees that bear fruit in the middle of a new pine forest.
An early apple in the orchard at Silver Bush, the Park Corner home of Montgomery’s Campbell relatives.
Given these cyclical, inevitable changes, it’s even more remarkable that the sites devoted to keeping Anne Shirley’s story alive—the house and grounds of Green Gables; the adjoining homesite, where Montgomery grew up; and Silver Bush in Park Corner, where her dear Campbell relatives lived and where the Anne of Green Gables Museum now stands—can maintain their timeless feel. The custodians of these places—the National Park Service and the descendants of the Macneill and Campbell families—have worked wonders in preserving these windows into the lives and the land of Anne’s Avonlea.
Theirs is not an easy task. Not only do they have to maintain a sense of late-nineteenth-century life in a twenty-first-century world, they also have to walk a very thin line between the real world of Maud Montgomery and the fictional world so vividly inhabited by Anne and Diana and Gilbert, and by Marilla and Matthew and Rachel Lynde. Such finessing is most visible at the beautifully maintained house, Green Gables, and on the surrounding acres. It can be tough to remember that the Haunted Wood seen today is not the same woods of Maud’s and Anne’s time, nor is Lover’s Lane the same lane, nor the orchards the ones that framed Anne’s view out her upstairs window. Even the house has evolved over the years—the original shingles replaced by clapboards, the second story extended over the kitchen, and electricity brought in, relegating candles and lamps to sideboards or closets.
And yet the rooms appear furnished exactly as Anne Shirley knew them—the bedrooms look as though their occupants just left for the day; the utensils in the kitchen appear ready for the next meal; and the stairs Anne and the Cuthberts went up and down still resonate with the sound of those earlier feet. From the vintage clothing and furniture to the geraniums in the windows, the house seems to embody the years when Anne’s essence completely filled it.
For visitors keen to see how the land influenced Maud Montgomery, and how she, in turn, celebrated its significance in her work, a good introduction to the area is to save Green Gables for later in the tour and head first to the site of the home that Maud Montgomery shared with her grandparents. Today, only the foundation remains of the house where she lived for over half her life, a further reminder of the years that have passed since she stared out the windows, outlined Anne’s adventures, and kept her manuscript well hidden from visitors, many of whom were arriving for their mail, as the house also served as the local post office. Standing near the old cellar hole, it’s easy to imagine the smells of the orchard in bloom, the sight of cows seeking shade, or the sounds of the trees, “always rustling and whispering to you.”
The back orchard of Maud Montgomery’s grandparents’ house, c. 1890s. Photograph by L. M. Montgomery.
Dry-stacked stone foundation on the site of the former Macneill house, where Maud Montgomery lived with her grandparents.
A tree-lined trail, suggesting one that Anne and Diana might have used, heads away from the old foundation, crosses the main road, and enters the well-marked Haunted Wood. From here to Green Gables, signs inscribed with lines from Montgomery’s writings evoke the intimate relationship both she and Anne felt with the land. (“I consider it a misfortune to love any place as I love this old homestead . . . the agony of parting from it is intolerable”; “I love this old home deeply . . . and I love Cavendish.”) Depending on the day and the traffic, or the decision to wander slowly or hurry on to the bigger attraction, the trail can provide the same smells of earth and pine, the same play of light and shadow, the same moist air above the stream that both knew and loved.
Entering Green Gables from this direction offers a clearer threshold between the real world of Maud Montgomery and the fictional world of Anne Shirley. Once inside Anne’s home, it’s easy to see a geranium as an old friend (“Bonny!”), or sense the young orphan’s fear when she wasn’t sure if she’d be allowed to stay, or witness her fury at Rachel Lynde for noting how skinny she was and homely and so very red-haired.
A geranium in the window at Green Gables; Anne gave the name “Bonny” to Marilla’s apple-scented geranium.
Anne’s fury at Rachel Lynde; “‘I hate you,’ she cried in a choked voice, stamping her foot on the floor.” Illustration by M. A. and W. A. J. Claus, from the 1908 edition.
Outside the house, another well-marked trail takes visitors down Lover’s Lane, past sun-warmed roses, and alongside a tall stand of birches. To many readers, this stretch of the island will feel like hallowed ground, as Montgomery loved Lover’s Lane “idolatrously” and felt “happier there than anywhere else.” She celebrated its beauty in all seasons and knew to seek it out as a cure for her sorrows. “It is the dearest spot in the world to me,” she wrote in an 1899 journal entry, “and has the greatest influence for good over me. No matter how dark my mood is, no matter how heavy my heart . . . an hour in that beautiful solitude will put me right with myself and the world.”
The Balsam Hollow Trail, a spur off Lover’s Lane, winds through spruce and fir trees, a remnant of the earlier Acadian forest. A quiet stream runs through it, evoking images of the hours the children of Avonlea spent trouting or plucking spruce gum from tree trunks (when still pliable, the bits of golden resin can be chewed like gum) or dipping twigs in balsam pitch for the rainbows they made on still water.
In spring, woodland flowers carpet the ground. In late summer and fall, Canada dogwood’s orange-red berries—what Anne calls pigeon berries—stand out against the dark greens of the conifers around them. Also known as bunchberry, Canada dogwood often grows in these Acadian forests alongside starflower, twinflower (June bells in the novels), Canada mayflower or wild lily of the valley (Anne calls them rice lilies), and yellow bluebead-lily or clintonia. In any season, if the day is clear or the clouds open, the light that comes through the boughs overhead sifts “through so many emerald screens that it [is] as flawless as the heart of a diamond.”
After leaving Green Gables, another interesting site can be found a short drive to the west on Route 6. Avonlea Village, designed to provide visitors a sense of Anne Shirley’s community, reveals many of the architectural features of buildings from her era. While most are replicas, two notable original buildings were moved to the site: the schoolhouse where Maud Montgomery taught in Belmont from 1896 to 1897, and the Presbyterian church from Long River, which she attended when visiting relatives at Park Corner (the building had to be cut into four pieces to be moved). For years, craftspeople in period costume engaged in activities of Anne’s time; the site now functions as a place of shops and restaurants.
Several of the buildings in Avonlea Village were moved to the site; others were designed to replicate period houses.
For an ideal ending to such a day, it’s worth a drive down the road to the National Park’s Cavendish Beach, perhaps holding in mind the way it looked to Anne when she first saw the view—red cliffs and white sand with the sea straight ahead, “shimmering and blue, and over it soared the gulls, their pinions flashing silvery in the sunlight.” Boardwalks cross the dunes at regular intervals, providing access to the miles-long beach and the wind- and sea-carved cliffs.
Members of the Campbell family along the north shore of Prince Edward Island, c. 1890s. Photograph by L. M. Montgomery.
After strolling the beach or climbing the sandstone formations, visitors can have a quieter, more shaded walk on the trail behind the dunes, along the adjacent wetlands and cattail-lined marshes. The trail eventually reaches the large Macneill Pond (also known as Cavendish Pond)—the other body of water that Montgomery had in mind when envisioning the Lake of Shining Waters (the main influence was the Campbells’ pond at Park Corner).
For a fuller immersion into Anne’s and Maud’s worlds, it’s worth devoting a second day to a tour of Montgomery’s birthplace in New London (called Clifton at the time of her birth) and Silver Bush, in the town of Park Corner, where her cousins and dear Uncle John and Aunt Annie Campbell lived, and where their descendants continue to maintain the Anne of Green Gables Museum. The first of these, looking as it might have during the first two years of the author’s life, displays such artifacts as the dress Montgomery was married in and the shoes she wore for the ceremony, along with several of her early scrapbooks. The labels and careful arrangements (all in Montgomery’s hand) reflect her awareness of the growing interest in everything about her, and her desire to shape the way that information was presented.
The house in New London (formerly called Clifton), where Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874.
On the northwestern side of New London Bay is Silver Bush, where Maud Montgomery spent some of her happiest years—the house, the barn, the orchard, and the Lake of Shining Waters. Visitors to the house can find rooms full of photographs, handwritten letters framed and on the walls, and a breakfront with the reminder that it was in just such a reflection that Anne (and Maud) conversed with their imagined companions. Here, too, one can ride a horse-pulled wagon driven by a Matthew Cuthbert look-alike and walk by the lake in its various moods and meditative moments.
While the landscapes of Cavendish and Park Corner provide the setting for Anne of Green Gables (and the later novels Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat), for more insight into Maud Montgomery’s life, a journey west to Prince County then down to Lower Bedeque is well worth the drive to see the areas where Montgomery taught school, where she became engaged to Edwin Simpson, where she struggled with terrible loneliness, and where she fell in love with another man, eventually breaking off her first engagement.
At the first of her teaching appointments, in Bideford, on the far west end of Malpeque Bay, she boarded with the Esteys in a Victorian home that’s open to visitors today. In some ways, the year was a surprising success for her—“the last happy year of my life,” she wrote in 1910, after spending a day thinking about her “whole past life.” Further evidence of her emotional state is suggested by what is not in her journals, as this was a period of time when she wasn’t crafting lengthy, lyrical descriptions of the land to buoy her spirits; in Bideford, teaching took her full attention and the social whirl delighted her.
A plaque outside Silver Bush, home of Montgomery’s Campbell relatives, identifies the importance of the place to her. “I love this old spot,” she wrote in a letter to her cousin Donald Campbell, “better than any place on earth.”
During her time in Bideford, she saved enough money from her salary (with additional support from her grandmother) to spend the subsequent year at the Halifax Ladies College (now Dalhousie University) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There, she took as many courses as she could to help advance her desire of becoming a better writer. Her funds only covered the single year, however, at which point she had to resort to another year of teaching, this time in Belmont, on the southern shore of Malpeque Bay. (The old one-room schoolhouse has since been moved to Avonlea Village in Cavendish.) Student needs, lonely hours, the constant cold in the room where she boarded (she writes of waking to snow on her pillow) marked the year as “the hardest I ever lived . . . in almost every way a year could be hard.”
A drive through the region reveals a scrubbier land than the lush hills of Cavendish, the soil poorer, the exposure more harsh—as Montgomery notes in her journal, when aching for a place to walk, “no leafy lanes, no secluded fields . . . The only place is the bay shore and that is rather damp and boggy just now.” She seemed to shiver day and night; she struggled with her teaching load and the pinched social setting; and, lonely and facing an uncertain future, she finally relented to Edwin Simpson’s entreaties and became engaged to him.
Her final year as a teacher was spent in Lower Bedeque, in the southwestern corner of Prince County near where the Dunk River flows into Bedeque Bay, and Prince Edward Island is narrowest. Here, everything seems more fertile, the prevailing winds gentler, the community more welcoming. A historical site commemorates this period of her life—which was also marked by a love affair with Herman Leard and personal torment about misleading Ed Simpson—with a restored one-room schoolhouse, complete with original outhouse, hand pump, and line-up of tin cups. Of this time she simply writes, “A year of mad passion!”
It would take her months, though she might have said years, to recover from the affair and the dissolution of the engagement, though it was the death of her grandfather during that tumultuous time, in March of 1898, that most altered her life. She returned to Cavendish to care for her grandmother, who was then seventy-six, and there she slowly began to recover. A year later, the familiar landscapes had worked their magic.
It is evening while I am writing. The sun has got down behind the trees and their long, lazy shadows are falling over the lane and fields. Beyond, the brown hills are basking in an amber radiance underneath a pale aerial sky of rose and blue. The firs on the south hill are like burnished bronze and their long shadows are barring the hill meadows. Dear old world, you are very beautiful and I love you well.
Though it would be several more years before she began work on Anne of Green Gables, Maud Montgomery’s deep love for her dear old Cavendish world had proven restorative, an affection that she would soon channel through a spirited eleven-year-old girl.
I had, in my vivid imagination, a passport to the geography of Fairyland. In a twinkling I could—and did—whisk myself into regions of wonderful adventures, unhampered by any restrictions of time or place.
—THE ALPINE PATH
