A wash stand at Green Gables.
In addition to the primary destination for visitors to Prince Edward Island—the Green Gables Heritage Place in Cavendish—the following resources, both real and virtual, provide greater context for the life and times of Maud Montgomery and Anne Shirley.
Anne of Green Gables Museum
4542 Route 20, Park Corner, PE, Canada
The house at Park Corner (home to her dear relatives, Aunt Annie and Uncle John Campbell), which Montgomery called Silver Bush, is where she spent some of the happiest times of her early life and found inspiration for many of her stories. Still owned by the Campbell family, the property has become an important museum for readers interested in knowing more about Montgomery and the characters in her novels. In addition to a tour of the house, which includes the parlor where Maud Montgomery married Ewan Macdonald, visitors can walk alongside the Lake of Shining Waters, take a carriage ride with a Matthew Cuthbert look-alike, or wander through the adjacent apple orchard.
Avonlea Village
8779 Route 6, Cavendish, PE, Canada
A half mile east of Green Gables, Avonlea Village offers visitors a chance to see original buildings from Montgomery’s time. The schoolhouse where she taught in Belmont and the Long River parsonage and church that she attended with her family were moved to the site and carefully restored, while replicas of other period buildings were added to create a sense of a small community. For many years, visitors were treated to scenes of craftspeople engaged with the activities of Anne’s time; the emphasis now is on shops and restaurants, and the site often hosts weddings and other Anne-influenced celebrations.
Canada’s Historic Places
www.gov.pe.ca/hpo/index.php3?number=1022313&lang=E
This website identifies houses of significance to L.M. Montgomery that are included on both the Prince Edward Island and the Canada registers of historic places. Locations appear in the order in which Montgomery became associated with them, with architectural information about each along with relevant quotations from Montgomery’s writings.
The Confederation Centre of the Arts
145 Richmond Street, Charlottetown, PE, Canada
confederationcentre.com/en/index.php
The Confederation Centre Art Gallery houses Montgomery’s two earliest scrapbooks (covering the period from 1893 to 1909) during the winter; they spend the rest of the year at her birthplace in New London, where they’re protected under glass. A virtual exhibit of Montgomery’s scrapbooks can be seen at: http://lmm.confederationcentre.com/english/scrapbooks/scrapbooks.html#.
Green Gables Heritage Place
8619 Cavendish Road, Cavendish, PE, Canada
pc.gc.ca/en/lhn-nhs/pe/greengables
The green-gabled farmhouse that became L. M. Montgomery’s inspiration for the home Anne Shirley would share with the Cuthberts is now a National Historic Site managed by Canada’s national park service, Parks Canada. Visitors can tour the house, with its period furnishings and rooms that evoke the fictional characters, and explore the grounds, including Lover’s Lane, Balsam Hollow and the Haunted Wood.
The Leaskdale Manse
11850 Durham Regional Road 1, Leaskdale, ON, Canada
The first home Montgomery could call her own, and where she designed her first garden, is a National Historic Site, along with the adjacent church where Ewan was minister; both are open to the public.
The L. M. Montgomery Birthplace
6461 Route 20 (at the intersection with Route 6), New London, PE, Canada
Designated as a historic site due to its architectural integrity, this small frame house, relatively unchanged since Maud Montgomery’s birth in 1874, is now a museum, where guides offer informative tours of rooms outfitted in period furniture. Here visitors can see the room where Montgomery was born, a replica of the dress and shoes she wore at her wedding, as well as scrapbooks she maintained.
The L. M. Montgomery Literary Society
http://lmmontgomeryliterarysociety.weebly.com/
Based in the Midwest, the L. M. Montgomery Literary Society is a resource for enthusiasts all over the world. The website includes a chronology with links for creating a self-guided literary tour of Montgomery-associated sites, both on PEI and in Ontario, as well as information for collectors of L. M. Montgomery’s books.
The Lucy Maud Montgomery Heritage Garden
477 Guelph Street, Norval, ON, Canada
In Norval, volunteers helped create the Lucy Maud Montgomery Heritage Garden at her home with a “Garden of the Senses” designed as an interactive engagement with the same species of plants found in Anne of Green Gables.
Macphail Woods Ecological Forestry Project
269 Macphail Park Road., Orwell, PE, Canada
For visitors interested in the restoration of native forests, Macphail Woods (a twenty-minute drive east of Charlottetown) is a research facility that offers walking trails, an arboretum, and a native plant nursery. The nature guides available on the website offer information and photographs of local flora and fauna. Additional Prince Edward Island walking trails can be found at islandtrails.ca/en/index.php; the trail closest to Green Gables, the Breadalbane Natural Trail, follows the Dunk River through stands of spruce trees and mixed hardwoods, with long stretches of ferns and woodland blossoms that evoke Anne Shirley’s childhood.
The Site of L. M. Montgomery’s Cavendish Home: The Macneill Homestead
Route 6, a quarter-mile east of Green Gables Heritage Place, Cavendish
The site of the house Montgomery shared with her grandparents and where she wrote Anne of Green Gables, as well as hundreds of other stories and poems, offers visitors a sense of the old homestead. The foundation site remains, surrounded by old apple trees, with a vegetable and flower garden nearby. Staff at the small museum and bookstore can provide excellent background information on Maud’s life and times. A trail from the homesite crosses Route 6 and winds through the Haunted Wood to Green Gables.
The University of Guelph Library
50 Stone Road East, Guelph, ON, Canada
For those interested in learning more about Maud Montgomery, the L. M. Montgomery Research Centre website is an invaluable resource. Hundreds of historic photos, many taken by Maud Montgomery, along with pages from her early journals and scrapbooks have been scanned and cataloged and can now be viewed digitally, while more material from the archive continues to be added on a regular basis.