Vivian's RV Vignettes

Today I went and checked out some of the Lucy Maud Montgomery-related sites that aren’t right in Cavendish. Out of curiosity (and a hunger for a fast-food burger that doesn’t cost $20) I drove over to Summerside, scene of “Anne of Windy Poplars,” one of the few major place names she didn’t bother to disguise. On the way, I stopped by LMM’s place of birth. It’s a cute, tiny cottage by the side of the road. I took exterior pictures but didn’t bother to pay to go in… it didn’t seem like there could possibly be much to see in a place so small!

Summerside is a big modern town, home of strip malls and Walmart and MacDonald’s. They’re not particularly catering to the Anne/LMM tourist crowd. Just for fun, I took a picture of the local high school, since Anne was supposed to have been the principal of Summerside High School.

Next, I doubled back to Park Corner, home of Ingleside and Silver Bush Farm. LMM was brought up by her maternal grandparents in Cavendish after her mother’s death, but she remained close to her paternal grandparents and various cousins in Park Corner. Silver Bush Farm, owned by her Campbell cousins, is now operated as the Anne of Green Gables Museum. From what I understand, it is still owned by the Campbell family and has a lot of original furnishings. “Silver Bush” doesn’t appear directly in the Anne books, but it features in some of her other writings such as “Pat of Silver Bush” and “Emily of New Moon” (which, I confess, I haven’t read).

I didn’t get a very good exterior picture of the house, but it’s just to the right of the barn there, behind the trees.

LMM was married in this parlor, and this organ played the music for her wedding.

(The corner of the “Blue Chest” is just visible in my picture of the kitchen from above.)

(Funny side note: inside the close quarters of the museum, I was trying to stay out of the way of a big coach-load of Japanese tourists and their tour guide. I read online that Anne of Green Gables is immensely popular in Japan, to the point that Japanese couples will come to PEI to get married.)

The “Lake of Shining Waters” is visible from the windows of the house.

You can take a buggy ride around the Lake of Shining Waters. (I didn’t. It was too cold and windy.)

The north end of the Lake of Shining Waters, from the bridge that takes the road across it. I suppose you could identify that with the bridge where Anne was famously saved by Gilbert, but nowadays it’s filled in with land and the north and south ends of the pond are only joined by a culvert too small for Anne to drown in!

Across the road and the lake is the Montgomery Inn at Ingleside, operated as a sort of bed and breakfast I think. The house belonged to LMM’s paternal grandparents. Her grandfather, incidentally, was a Canadian Senator, so she came from a fairly important family. She must have liked the name “Ingleside” since she used it for Anne’s home in her married life… I don’t know if the house itself was the same in her mind or not.

I headed on back towards New London (LMM’s birthplace) to get back to Cavendish, but stopped to take a picture of the striking view of New London Bay and Campbellton, which instantly made me think of the book descriptions of Four Winds Harbor and Glen St. Mary.

The pictures don’t really do it justice, sadly. I remembered reading online that LMM’s inspiration for Four Winds had come from Park Corner and New London, even though in the book she set it much further away from Avonlea than those places really are from Cavendish. It’s like she took all the geographical furniture of her childhood and spread it around and rearranged it to serve her stories.

After my drive, I found that an enterprising soul had used all the clues from the books to map Four Winds onto New London Bay:

I’d say that’s pretty convincing! In that case, you can pretend that big gray house in my picture is Miss Cornelia’s house, repainted from green. 😉

After that I headed back to Cavendish, but my GPS decided I needed to see one of those red roads Anne was so curious about.

Back in Cavendish, I stopped to have a look at the church that was LMM’s home church when she lived here, which also hosted her funeral. I had thought of trying to attend a service tomorrow, but sadly it appears there is no longer an active congregation there.

With that, I think I’ve pretty much seen what I want to see here. Delving so much into preserved bits of history intertwined with fiction is fun but a little disorienting, like living simultaneously in the present, the past, and fantasyland. Tomorrow I head on back to Maine and the twenty-first century.