L. M. Montgomery’s Birthplace

I’m telling about my 55th Birthday Adventure to Prince Edward Island with my friends Darlene and Ruth. We drove up the East Coast on a late September weekend. On Monday, we visited Green Gables Heritage Place and walked on the trail through the Haunted Wood to Montgomery Park and L. M. Montgomery’s Cavendish home. We finished the day with a short drive along the shore where we saw a fox.

Tuesday, our second day on the island, dawned with pouring rain. But that answered the question I’d had in planning the day: Should we begin our journey with all the L. M. Montgomery sites, or break them up with sight-seeing and hiking? The answer was that a rainy day was an absolutely perfect day to visit museums, and that’s what we did, beginning with L. M. Montgomery’s Birthplace in New London.

It’s a lovely little house, only about fifteen minutes away from Cavendish by car. I kept thinking about how different that would have been a hundred and forty-five years ago, when people got around with horses and buggies. It was a beautiful drive, too, with more hills than I had realized would be there, and plenty of farms and trees with leaves changing color.

Now, Lucy Maud Montgomery only lived in this house a couple of years. Her mother died when she was still a baby, and her father gave her into the keeping of her mother’s parents in Cavendish. So Maud Montgomery was brought up by her grandparents, very similar to the situation of her heroine from Emily of New Moon.

Even though Maud didn’t live in this house to remember it, the house is packed with L. M. Montgomery memorabilia, including an exact replica of her wedding gown.

I loved the original manuscripts and scrapbooks!

There were also some first editions of her books.

Clippings from articles about her included a picture from Cavendish shore. I now filled in the red-colored cliffs I’d seen the evening before!

The rooms upstairs were furnished for the time period.

This is the bedroom where Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874.

We lingered over the displays and then did some shopping. I chose some books about L. M. Montgomery and Prince Edward Island that I didn’t already have and couldn’t simply buy on Amazon. They stamped them as purchased at L. M. Montgomery’s birthplace.

Then we prepared to drive on to Silver Bush, the place where Maud Montgomery’s “merry Campbell cousins” lived, the place she got married, and the place she came back and visited for the rest of her life.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *