In the Footsteps of L.M. Montgomery on Prince Edward Island

For those of you who have been anxiously anticipating more sewing projects, please rest assured that a whole host of them are forthcoming in the next few weeks!  We're very excited about them all and are looking forward to sharing them with you.  But in the meantime...

Beautiful fields of lupines splash brilliant colors across the Island's landscapes.

As I mentioned in the previous post, we visited Prince Edward Island three times in the 1990s, primarily because our entire family (even our dad!) adores Anne of Green Gables and we were all interested in seeing the place that inspired it.  Needless to say, after the first trip, we fell thoroughly in love with the Island and its people and it irresistibly drew us back a couple more times.  Lately, we've been discussing our mutual desire to return at some point in the future, and we brought out the old photo albums to reminisce and wallow in our very fond memories.  Here's a brief photo summary of some of the L.M. Montgomery historic sites we visited, interspersed with a couple of random Island views, to complement our previous post.  Enjoy!

This is the small house in New London (once called Clifton) where Lucy Maud was born on 30 November 1874.  The tiny upstairs bedroom interprets the event, with a cradle placed at the foot of the bed.  Also featured in this house museum are some of Maud's many and fascinating scrapbooks and her wedding ensemble.

When Maud's mother died a couple of years after the birth of her child, Hugh John Montgomery sent his baby daughter to live with her maternal grandparents, the Macneills, in Cavendish, on the north shore of PEI. Their homestead - the house where Anne of Green Gables was written - sadly no longer stands, but the foundation has been preserved and is open to the public.

Down a winding, tree-canopied path, across the road, and through "The Haunted Woods" (yes, these are the woods that inspired the ones in the book!)...

...is Green Gables house, which was the home of Maud's grandfather's cousins, brother and sister David and Margaret Macneill.

Parks Canada acquired the property in 1937 and restored it to its turn-of-the-century appearance. Each room has been staged to interpret an aspect of Anne's Green Gables, from the dining room...

...to Anne's room (note the "puffed sleeves" dress and the carpet bag!)...

...to Marilla's practically plain bedroom, complete with amethyst broach on the dresser...

...to Matthew's room...

The house also contains some Montgomery artifacts, including the typewriter on which Maud prepared Anne of Green Gables for publication.

In 1897, Maud left the cozy Cavendish community that she loved and went to teach for a year in Lower Bedeque. The one-room schoolhouse in which she taught still stands and has been restored to its appearance during Maud's tenure there. The house where she boarded, which was just across the street, has unfortunately disappeared.

One of LMM's favorite places on the Island was the home of her Campbell cousins at Park Corner. The house has come to be known as "Silver Bush," after the novel it inspired.

Maud stayed here often in this upstairs bedroom...

...and was married in the house's parlor, in front of the fireplace, in 1911.

The house remains in the Campbell family (incredibly lovely people to chat with) and is full of family heirlooms, including the Crazy Quilt that Maud and her cousins made, which is a truly stunning piece of work.

A view of Silver Bush, complete with "the Lake of Shining Waters."

The manuscript of Anne of Green Gables is owned by the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown and is frequently on display.  We were fortunate enough to catch it featured in two different LMM exhibits during our trips.

And of course, any pilgrimage in homage of LMM would not be complete without a visit to her final resting place in Cavendish, nearby the old Macneill property. Maud and her husband Ewan are buried together, right next to Maud's mother, Clara Macneill Montgomery, and her grandparents Alexander and Lucy Woolner Macneill.

Of course, there are many other gorgeous views to be seen around the Island, some Montgomery-related, like Dalvay by the Sea, which you might recognize as the "White Sands Hotel" of the TV Avonlea (and yes, it really is a hotel)...

...and some not-so-directly Montgomery related, but one can easily imagine them as views that the authoress herself could easily have seen and relished, like the picturesque West Point Lighthouse against the famous Island red sands (the lighthouse serves as a restaurant and inn, in addition to being a functional lighthouse, and was our absolute favorite place that we stayed)...

...and the typical, very lovely farms that define the landscape of this magical place.

Fun with Census Records: The Case of L.M. Montgomery

In a previous post, we used U.S. census records to trace the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her immediate family.  Now, we'll turn to our north and to another one of our favorite childhood authors and take a look at Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) using the same type of resource, this time in Canada.

Lucy Maud Montgomery at age ten in 1882.

Photo linked from wikipedia.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on the 30th of November 1874 in New London (then called Clifton), Prince Edward Island.  The first Canadian census in which we can track her is thus 1881, where we find her at six years old living in nearby Cavendish.  The trouble with this particular census is that it does not indicate the relationships of the individuals within a household, so without knowing a bit of additional information about LMM's life, things could get confusing at this point.  Here we see her, listed as "Lucy M. Montgomery," living in a household with McNeills: Alexander, Lucy Ann, Chester B, and Mary E.  LMM's mother died before young Lucy Maud was two, and her father shortly after relinquished his infant daughter to her maternal grandparents, the Macneills.  Maud was thus raised by her grandparents, who we see here with two of their children, Maud's uncle and aunt.

To view the complete record, click here, and then click on "view image."

Here is Hugh John Montgomery, Maud's father, still on Prince Edward Island in that same year, 1881.  The widower returned briefly to his parents' home before departing for Saskatchewan.  In 1890, after he had established himself and a new home out west, Maud's father sent for her to come and live with him and his new wife and family.  Although she stayed with him for only a year, the 1891 census caught her with her father's family in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, just before she left to return home to the Macneills on Prince Edward Island.

This census, unlike the previous one, indicates the relationships of each member of the household, and also the place of birth of each individual and each individual's father and mother.  Here we see Hugh Montgomery at age 49; he was born on P.E.I., as were both of his parents.  His new wife, 28-year-old Mary, was born in Ontario.  Then comes 16-year-old Maud, who, as we know was born on P.E.I., as was her father.  But what's interesting is that it indicates her mother was born Ontario.  Clearly either the census taker assumed that Maud was Mary's daughter as well, or he was not told anything to the contrary for some particular reason or another.  Beneath Maud are her two new half-siblings, Katie and Bruce, as well as a Scottish servant.

To view the complete record, click here, and then click on "view image."

After the short stay with her father, Maud was glad to return to her roots on Prince Edward Island and she remained there until her marriage.  The 1901 census shows her living alone with her grandmother; her grandfather had died in 1898.  Things get more exciting, however, when you look at the household three below theirs.  Brother and sister David and Margaret Mcneill, here living with their adopted nieces, were the owners of "Green Gables" house, just down a path and across the road from Maud and her grandmother.  They were cousins of Maud's grandfather, and Maud spent a good deal of time visiting the pair when she was growing up.  They would later become one of the inspirations for Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert.

To view the complete record, click here. 

An easier-on-the-eyes transcription can be found here.

On 5 July 1911, L.M. Montgomery married the Rev. Ewan Macdonald and the couple moved to Ontario.  I have a feeling Maud got caught in between with this year's census.  Here is her husband listed alone without his new bride in Ontario, which implies this was taken prior to July.  I have been unable to trace the unmarried Maud on Prince Edward Island, however, so I'm assuming she was married and had left the Island prior to the P.E.I. enumeration later in the year.

L.M. Montgomery in 1907, just prior to the publication of Anne of Green Gables.

Photo linked from extraordinarycanadians.

Canada has not yet released the census records for any enumeration after 1911, so this is as far as we can go with Maud's life for the present.  While these few censuses (censi?!) don't come close to representing the full, varied, and very exciting scope of Maud's early life (they don't show her at college or boarding away from Cavendish as a teacher, nor do they show her living with her Campbell cousins, as she did for some months following the death of her grandmother while she prepared for her wedding), they do offer an intriguing glimpse of the places and people that structured her life.  We look forward to the release of additional records to see what else we can learn about the life of this influential and extraordinary writer.

In the mid-1990s, we visited Prince Edward Island several times to see the historic sites and places that were such an integral part of the life and works of LMM.  We've been feeling awfully nostalgic about those trips and recently dug out the photo albums to reminisce and wish ourselves back there again.  In an upcoming post, we'll share some of those photos (however old they may be now!) to give you a brief tour of one of our all-time favorite places to visit.  Hopefully one day (soon!) we'll get back there.  :-)

Reproducing L.M. Montgomery's Trousseau

Back on January 7th, we did a post about the wedding clothes and trousseau of L.M. Montgomery, a discussion prompted by the discovery of a pattern of Anne's wedding dress from the third Anne movie, Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story.  In that earlier post, we marveled that photos, a verbal description, and even swatches of some of the fabric had survived to record Montgomery's trousseau in such intimate detail.  Just imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered this post on Laurie's blog yesterday about a tailor who has just finished recreating almost the entire trousseau in honor of LMM's 100th wedding anniversary.  Talk about a historical costumer's dream project!

Smith with the reproduction trousseau.

Photo linked from the Guardian article.

In a July 4th article for PEI's Guardian, tailor Arnold Smith describes how he got the idea to bring Montgomery's trousseau back to life.  For the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables back in 2008, Smith costumed Cavendish's commemorative parade and picnic, and it was during his research for that event that he stumbled across the images of the trousseau.  This past February, he began work on it and the six garments premiered a week ago to mark the milestone anniversary of LMM's wedding day.

Smith meticulously researched each of the gowns in order to reproduce them as closely as possible.  As with any true reproduction project, however, some issues had to be thoughtfully addressed.  For instance, because the photographs of the original clothing show only the front sides, he delved into turn-of-the-century issues of the Ladies Home Journal to find similar styles that could provide an idea of how the rest of each garment most likely looked.  Fabrics, too, were carefully researched and selected both for their appropriateness to the period and according to LMM's own stated preferences for color tones, as Smith describes on his blog.  And to make these pieces as close as possible to true reproductions, Smith even constructed them in Montgomery's exact size, using her own detailed description of her physical appearance and measurements (Smith's blog entry offers the full quotation from the Journals).

Smith's reproduction of LMM's favorite gown from the trousseau.

Photo by Arnold Smith, linked from his blog on the project.

What I find most interesting about this project is the fact that it enlightened Smith (and all of us seeing the physical manifestation of these gowns now) not only about the garments themselves, but also about the woman who selected and wore them, offering an innovative way into thinking about the famous author's personality, her preferences, and the social pressures under which she functioned.  "'She liked nice clothes. As an author, she was always being asked to speak, so she knew that she needed things that were classy,' he says.  But, as a minster’s wife, she could never be over the top.  'To be taken seriously she had to be both well dressed and appropriately dressed. Her trousseau reflects that,' says Smith" (Guardian article). 

From now until the end of the summer, half of the reproduction trousseau will be on view at the Green Gables Heritage Place in Cavendish, PEI, and the other half can be seen at the Leaksdale Manse in Uxbridge, Ontario, where LMM lived after her marriage and where 11 of the 22 works published during her lifetime were written.  If you can't make it to see the reproduction trousseau in person, be certain to visit Arnold Smith's blog for many more details on the project, the process, and the products, including lots of superb research and loads of pictures!  For further information, see also the Guardian article mentioned above, and this article in The Buzz.

If you're interested in reading more about LMM's original trousseau, be sure to visit our earlier post (which includes photos and a list of resources), as well as the Confederation Centre's "L.M. Montgomery's Wedding Clothes" page.  Additional photos of the trousseau can be found in The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. II and in The Lucy Maud Montgomery Album, by Kevin McCabe.

Thanks again to Laurie for discovering this story and sharing it!

Novel Beginnings: The "Real" Anne of Green Gables

The myths of origin and inspiration surrounding our favorite works of literature are oftentimes just as fascinating and magnetic as the works themselves.  Here's an account of how one of our personal all-time-favorite books came into being.

First edition cover of Anne of Green Gables (1908).

Linked from Wikipedia.

On 16 August 1907, Lucy Maud Montgomery recorded in her journal that her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, had just been accepted for publication by the L.C. Page Company of Boston.  She reminisced about the agony she had felt at trying to begin the book: "I have always hated beginning a story.  When I get the first paragraph written I feel as though it were half done" (Selected Journals, Vol. 1, p. 330).  Then she hit upon her inspiration:

"I have always kept a notebook in which I jotted down, as they occurred to me, ideas for plots, incidents, characters, and descriptions.  Two years ago in the spring of 1905 I was looking over this notebook in search of some suitable idea for a short serial I wanted to write for a certain Sunday School paper and I found a faded entry, written many years before: - “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy.  By mistake a girl is sent them.”  I thought this would do.  I began to block out the chapters, devise incidents and “brood up” my heroine."

(Selected Journals, Vol. I, p. 330)

 The "faded entry" did not record a fleeting spark of imagination specifically conjured as a future plot, but rather an actual incident in the life of Maud and her family, as the writer detailed in a later journal entry on 27 January 1911: “The idea of getting a child from an orphan asylum was suggested to me years ago as a possible germ for a story by the fact that Pierce Macneill got a little girl from one, and I jotted it down in my notebook” (Selected Journals, Vol. II, p. 40).  "The "elderly couple" she noted was in fact Pierce Macneill (the cousin of LMM's grandfather) and his wife, Rachel, who lived directly across from the Green Gables property in Cavendish, PEI.  The childless couple had applied to adopt an orphan boy in 1892 to help out with the farm chores; their neighbors John and Annie Clark did the same.  But instead of two boys, the two sets of unsuspecting adoptive parents found a five-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister awaiting them at the train station.  When the Macneills contacted the orphanage about the mistake, they were told that because there were so few boys, and because they were hesitant to separate the siblings, they had sent the little girl with her brother instead.  Like Matthew and Marilla, Pierce and Rachel decided to keep and officially adopt the little girl, who they named Ellen and who took their surname.  Despite attempts by multiple researchers over the past twenty years to trace her birth name and family, no details about Ellen's origins have been found.  Even her place of birth has been questioned, with John Willoughby suggesting that Ellen and her brother were "Home Children" brought from England and Irene Gammel more recently arguing that the siblings more likely had been born in Nova Scotia. 

Ellen Macneill, ca. 1895.

Photo courtesy of Ruth Gallant and linked from Ryerson University.

Maud claimed that while the events surrounding Ellen's arrival had provided the impetus for the story of Anne of Green Gables, the character of Anne herself was nothing like the Macneill orphan.  "There is no resemblance of any kind between Anne and Ellen Macneill who is one of the most hopelessly commonplace and uninteresting girls imaginable" (Selected Journals, Vol. II, p. 40).  Either way, it's easy to see how the happy ending of the Macneill orphan mix-up would have started the wheels of Maud's vivid imagination turning.  As Mrs. Spenser said to Marilla, "I call it positively providential."


For more information on Ellen Macneill and the composition of Anne of Green Gables, take a look at:

- John Willoughby's Ellen is the only extended account of Ellen's life
- LMM-Anne.net's Anne of Green Gables "Creation and Publication" page
- The Selected Journals of Lucy Maud Montgomery, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterson.  There are five total volumes; volume two covers the year of Anne's publication.
- Irene Gammel's new book, Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed up a Literary Classic.  A preview of the American release of the book (which has an alternate title) can be found here on googlebooks.
- The most comprehensive LMM biography, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, by Mary Rubio
- LMM's autobiography, The Alpine Path, which includes her account of her writing career

Sewing for the Literary-Minded

Just before Christmas, while doing a little online holiday shopping, I discovered that the Sullivan Films shop offers for sale a pattern from Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story movie. It is Anne's wedding dress, a simple yet elegant gown inspired by a 1916 Canadian catalog wedding dress (because, if you recall, Anne's hurried wedding in the film necessitated the purchase of something pre-made).

My version of this dress will not be for a wedding; instead, I'm thinking perhaps either black (the sheer sleeves would look so pretty!) or a pastel color to make it a pretty springy outfit. With a hat, of course. Must have a hat.

I emailed the company to inquire if there were currently any plans to release any other patterns of costumes from the two earlier films, but they replied in the negative. Perhaps if we bombard them with inquiries so that they know there's plenty of interest, we can stir something up! I know I, for one, would love to get my hands on a pattern for Anne's "Gibson Girl" dress from Anne of Avonlea (er, Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel, if you prefer!), or that gorgeous gown she wears to the opera on her visit to Boston, or...well, I'd be happy with whatever they could offer!

Because of the timeline shift in the first Anne film, Kevin Sullivan had to bring the third up to the period of World War I. In the movie world, then, Anne and Gilbert don't marry until 1915, while in the book (Anne's House of Dreams), their wedding takes place around 1890, and it is not until the eighth volume in the series (Rilla of Ingleside) that L.M. Montgomery reaches the war years, by which time the main character has become Anne and Gilbert's youngest daughter.

Lucy Maud Montgomery (Anne's creator) and Ewan Macdonald were married on 5 July 1911, closer in date to the movie Anne and Gilbert than their original literary counterparts. We visited Prince Edward Island several times back in the mid-90s, and saw LMM's wedding gown on display at her birthplace in New London, and also visited the parlor room where she was married at her cousins the Campbells' home at Park Corner. Descendants of LMM still own the Park Corner property and permit wedding ceremonies to be conducted before the very same fireplace where LMM stood on her wedding day (and yes, all of the original furniture is still there, too). All three years we visited the house, there were couples having wedding pictures taken on the grounds.

LMM's wedding gown on display at the LMM Birthplace. 

Photo linked from Reverand Sam's flickr photostream.

LMM recorded in her journal that "my wedding dress was of white-silk crepe de soie with tunic of chiffon and pearl bead trimming - and of course the tulle veil and orange blossom wreath."  She also wore "Ewan's present - a necklace of of amethysts and pearls.  My bouquet was of white roses and lilies of the valley" (The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol II, pgs. 64-7).  Interestingly, these same materials - white silk de soie with a chiffon overdress decorated with bead trimming - were also used to create Anne's movie wedding dress, though in a much more "modern" style.

Photograph of LMM's wedding gown.  The gown is

the property of the LMM Birthplace.  The photo is

copyrighted by the LMM Institute.

The gown was made by Margaret Bulman of New Glasgow, PEI.  We visited well before the age of digital cameras, and the photos we have are so badly lit you can't make out what's in them, so I've had to link to online images instead.

Montgomery also wrote about the enjoyment she and her Park Corner cousins derived from the arrival of her trousseau, which the hard-earned funds from her newly-published novels had enabled her to order all the way from Toronto and Montreal. She modelled them proudly as her cousin snapped photographs, and later inserted the photos into one of her scrapbooks. Swatches of some of the fabrics were also carefully saved there, along with some flowers from her bouquet. Click here for a brief but very neat little video from the L.M. Montgomery Institute showing the scrapbook page.  I remember seeing some of LMM's scrapbooks on display at her New London Birthplace and at the PEI Confederation Centre of the Arts, but I don't recall seeing this particular one. Guess I'll just have to go back again!

Some of the photos are below, and she described the outfits thus in her journal: "My trousseau, which I had made mainly in Toronto and Montreal, began to arrive and we were all interested in that.  My things were pretty...These are snaps the girls took of some of my dresses.  My suit was of steel gray cloth, with gray chiffon blouse and gray hat trimmed with a wreath of tiny rosebuds.  My long wrap was of gray broadcloth.  Besides the dresses 'illustrated' I had a linen dress, a pink muslin, one of white embroidery, and several odd waists" (The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol II, pgs. 64-6).  If only they had survived as well as the wedding gown!

More images of the trousseau can be see in The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. II, pg. 65.

For further information on all of these items, visit the Confederation Centre's "L.M. Montgomery's Wedding Clothes" page.  The page is part of a larger project based on a recent exhibit of LMM's scrapbooks, called "Picturing a Canadian Life: L.M. Montgomery's Personal Scrapbooks and Book Covers."  If you're interested in taking a closer look at some of the scrapbooks (which intriguingly contain many swatches and fashion clippings), check out Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L.M. Montgomery, the book that accompanies the exhibit.  Further information on the life and writings of L.M. Montgomery can be found through the L.M. Montgomery Institute.