Storybook Island Canada’s Prince Edward Island Is The Charming Home Of ‘Anne Of Green Gables,’ Untainted By Modern Intrusions.

Few writers can have had more impact on a place than Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942), author of “Anne of Green Gables,” one of the most popular children’s books ever written.

All but one of Maud’s novels were set on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, and each summer, thousands of visitors come to see for themselves the places she wrote about.

In many parts of the world such pilgrimages would be frustrated by modern intrusions but not here. The island remains much as it has always been, and Maud’s childhood haunts are still there for those who seek them out.

With a population of less than 130,000. “PEI,” as it is commonly known, is Canada’s smallest province. Roughly 135 miles long, PEI has a low, rolling landscape with red, iron-rich soil. Many fields are planted with the island’s famous potatoes. The coastline is deeply indented by large bays and long inlets so that the sea is never far away.

Ferries from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia link PEI with the mainland but a controversial eight-mile bridge is under construction. Islanders are sharply divided on whether the bridge is a good idea. Some say it will bring desperately needed jobs while others fear the island will lose the quiet charm that Lucy Maud Montgomery loved so much and which still delights visitors year after year.

In her lifetime, Maud regretted the commercial cashing-in on the success of “Anne of Green Gables.” Heaven only knows what she would now think of the Anne Shirley Motel or Marilla’s Pizza and the Shining Waters Country Inn. Would she be bemused that car license plates on PEI bear the words “Home of Anne Green Gables” and busloads of giggling schoolgirls come from as far away as Japan to see Cavendish and Park Corner?

Nonetheless, the quest for Anne along the island’s pleasant, uncrowded road is a captivating experience. Armed with a good map, it becomes a quest for Maud herself - for the places of her own childhood which were the basis and setting for her stories.

The place to begin is Cavendish, midway along the island’s north coast. When she was less than 2 years old, Maud came here to live with her grandparents after her mother died and her father moved to western Canada to start a new life. Most of Maud’s 37 years on PEI were spent at Cavendish. She grew up here and returned often in later years.

The tiny community became the model for the fictional Avonlea, and Maud once wrote: “Were it not for those Cavendish years, I do not think ‘Anne of Green Gables’ would have ever been written.”

Only the apple orchards and the stones of the cellar survive from the house where Maud grew up and wrote the novel. But close by is the farmhouse of her grandfather’s cousins, David and Margaret MacNeill. Maud based her famous novel on this house, which she named “Green Gables.”

Restored to its 1890s appearance, it has antimacassars on the furniture, a cherry pie in the larder and family photographs on the walls. The bedrooms display main characters from the novel and Anne’s room is based on the description four years after she came to Green Gables.

The house draws more than 300,000 visitors each year, but at 7:30 on a summer morning the parking lot is empty. The grass is heavy with dew. The fragrance of lilac and honeysuckle surrounds the still house and only the chirp of a chickadee and the tapping of a woodpecker breaks the silence. One half expects the door to fly open and see young Maud bound out and run down the hill toward the spruce grove she loved to play in.

Here was the haunted Wood and Lover’s Lane of Anne’s imagination. Pathways wander among sun-dappled woods carpeted with bunchberry and across streams fringed with buttercups. Beside the paths are signs bearing quotations from Maud’s books showing her love of nature.

About seven miles west of Cavendish, following the scenic Blue Heron Drive, is the birthplace of Lucy Maud Montgomery in the tiny hamlet of New London. The author used the house as the model for Anne’s birthplace in “Anne of the Island.” Open to visitors, it displays Maud’s wedding dress, some of her scrapbooks and even a piece of fur saved from one of her beloved cats.

A few miles farther along Blue Heron Drive at Park Corner is one of Maud’s favorite places on the island, the home of her Uncle John Campbell. Maud spent happy summer holidays here as a young girl and described Park Corner as “a big, white, beautiful house smothered in orchards that was the wonder castle of my childhood. The very walls of that house must have been permeated by the essence of good times.” Maud came to live here after her grandmother died.

The house, still owned by family descendants, inspired many of Maud’s stories and is open to visitors as the Anne of Green Gables Museum. It contains the enchanted bookcase described in “Anne of Green Gables” and many first editions of the author’s works, as well as other memorabilia. Below the house is the farm pond which became Anne’s Lake of Shining Waters, while across the road the house of Maud’s grandfather, Senator Donald Montgomery, is open to visitors during summer months.

After receiving her teacher’s qualifications, Maud spent an unhappy year on the south shore of Malpeque Bay. She taught at the Melmont schoolhouse and boarded nearby at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Simon Fraser. Because she was so exhausted after a day’s teaching, Maud got up at 5:30 each morning, put on a heavy coat and wrote for an hour in her freezing room. Maud’s last teaching position at Lower Bedeque on the island’s south coast in 1897-98 was a much happier experience. She wrote that “the people are so nice, friendly and sociable. It is a lively place with lots of young people and I have had a lively time.”

The Lower Bedeque school has been restored and is typical of the one-room schoolhouses that were once common on the island. The Belmont school also survives - but as a storage shed.

In 1911, in the parlor at Park Corner, Maud was married to Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister. The next year they left Prince Edward Island and moved to Ontario where Macdonald was pastor of a congregation in Leaskdale, a small community northwest of Toronto. For the next 15 years, Maud brought up her family there and wrote fully half of her works.

When Lucy Maud Montgomery died in 1942 she returned at last to her beloved island and was buried in the cemetery at Cavendish in a plot she had chosen herself.

When the last visitors leave at the end of each season, Green Gables closes its shutters and Cavendish becomes so quiet that even the solitary stop light is taken down. Summer homes and tourist businesses are boarded up for another year and the locals settle in for the winter. The ferries chomp through the ice of Northumberland Strait and those who can head for Florida.

But next season another flock of visitors will arrive. Among the most eager will be the “children” of all ages who have loved and cherished the stories of a spirited little red-haired, freckle-faced girl, who is still as popular as when she came alive from the pen of Lucy Maud Montgomery almost 90 years ago.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO United States visitors to Canada can take advantage of the most favorable exchange rate in many years (one Canadian dollar equals about 70 cents U.S.) Visitors to PEI can choose between two automobile ferries. The shorter route is between Cape Tormentine, New Brunswick, and Borden, PEI. Crossing time is 45 minutes. The ferry from Pictou, Nova Scotia to Wood Islands, PEI, takes 75 minutes. Reservations are not needed. Most of the sites mentioned are open from June to October. Green Gables House in PEI National Park is open from mid-May to late October. The best guide for your Anne quest is “Finding Anne on PEI” published by the island’s Ragweed Press. The province of Prince Edward Island offers a free accommodation booking service, a detailed visitors guide book and maps. Call (800) 463-4734. Each summer, from late June to early September, a musical adaptation of “Anne of Green Gables” is performed in Charlottetown’s Confederation Centre of the Arts. For ticket reservations call (800) 565-0278.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gerald Fitzpatrick Special to Travel