The Site of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Cavendish Home is the place L.M. Montgomery called home for most of her life and where she wrote
Anne of Green Gables. It is part of L.M. Montgomery's Cavendish National Historic Site, which also includes the neighboring Green Gables house. You can walk between the two sites by going through “The Haunted Wood,” a place that L.M. Montgomery named herself and shared with her famous creation Anne Shirley.
After her mother’s death of tuberculosis, L.M. Montgomery was raised by her maternal grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Woolner Macneill, in Cavendish at their homestead. Cavendish was L.M. Montgomery’s home for over three decades from 1876 to 1911. L.M. Montgomery wrote with deep fondness of her Cavendish home, calling it “hallowed ground.” It was the land she loved and wrote about, even after she married and left Prince Edward Island.
Following her grandmother’s death in 1911, L. M. Montgomery married Ewen MacDonald and left Cavendish for Ontario. The homestead remained in the Macneill family, but the house was closed after L.M. Montgomery moved away. Around 1920, much of the original homestead fell to ruin, except for the kitchen. Today, the farm property is still owned by the Macneill family. In the 1980s, John Macneill, a great-grandson of Alexander and Lucy Woolner Macneill, and his wife Jennie Macneill tended to the site and opened it to visitors. The site has now been passed down to their son David Macneill, who operates and cares for it.
Little remains of the home itself apart from a hole in the ground, the foundation, and the stone cellar, but in recent years, the kitchen structure was returned to the site. Although much of the structure is gone, you can explore the site, and see the gardens, forests, and landscape that inspired L.M. Montgomery to write
Anne of Green Gables and many of her other stories. She loved the old apple trees, birches, poplars, spruces, pathways, and flower gardens surrounding her home.
There are placards placed around the homestead property with quotes from L.M. Montgomery’s journals that help visitors see through her eyes. L.M. Montgomery began writing
Anne of Green Gables in the kitchen of the Cavendish homestead, and wrote most of it in her cherished bedroom by its gable window. Nearby, you can walk down “Lover’s Lane” or you can spook yourself along the “The Haunted Wood” path, which leads to the Green Gables house. Montgomery named these places in her real life, and she brought them to life for her readers in
Anne of Green Gables.
There is a bookstore at the site with many books by and about L.M. Montgomery as well as other gifts. You can also see the desk and scales from the old
Cavendish Post Office, which L.M. Montgomery and her grandparents ran from their kitchen.
When the old house fell apart in the 1920s, only the kitchen survived. L.M. Montgomery’s uncle moved this part of the building and used it as an outbuilding in the barnyard to house animals and later as a storage shed. In the 1960s, a Catholic priest and historian named Father Francis Bolger was researching L.M. Montgomery and writing a biography about her. Father Bolger asked the Macneills if he could use the kitchen building, and they gave him permission to use it. He moved the kitchen structure to his summer home and cleaned and repaired the building, and then he used it as his writing cottage. In 1974, Father Bolger published a biography on L.M. Montgomery called
The Years Before Anne. In 2017, both John Macneill and Father Bolger passed away. After Father Bolger’s death, the kitchen was returned to the Macneill property in late 2018. Visitors can now see this portion of the original homestead, which is located next to the bookstore and is a museum.
The idea of a home is a key theme in many of L.M. Montgomery’s stories, including
Anne of Green Gables. For me, it was special to visit the place L.M. Montgomery called home.
Official Websites:
The Site of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Cavendish Home
L.M. Montgomery's Cavendish National Historic Site, Parks Canada
Location:
The Site of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Cavendish Home
8521 Cavendish Road Rte, PE-6, Cavendish, PE C0A 1N0, Canada.
Image credits:
Photographs by
World of Anne Shirley.
References:
Cavert, Mary Beth. (2024). The House of Home: Montgomery’s Macneill Grandparents’ Homestead. The
Anne of Green Gables Manuscript. Retrived from:
https://annemanuscript.ca/stories/the-house-of-home/
Hamilton, Kathleen and Frei, Sibyl.
Finding Anne on Prince Edward Island. Ragweed Press. 1998.
Krzewinski, Agatha. The Original Homes of Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Anne of Green Gables. Sullivan Entertainment. Retrieved from:
https://www.anneofgreengables.com/blog-posts/the-original-homes-of-lucy-maud-montgomery
L.M. Montgomery's Cavendish National Historic Site. (2024). Retrieved from:
https://parks.canada.ca/lhn-nhs/pe/cavendish
Piece of L.M. Montgomery's childhood home returned to original homestead. (2018, December 18). CBC News. Retrieved from:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-lucy-maud-montgomery-kitchen-building-homestead-1.4951107
The Site of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Cavendish Home. Retrieved from:
https://www.lmmontgomerycavendishhome.com/
Created July 17, 2007. Last
updated July 20, 2024.
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