Green Gables Heritage Place

Where it sits. Green Gables stands on the north shore of Prince Edward Island, inside the Cavendish section of Prince Edward Island National Park, roughly a kilometre back from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and a minute's drive from the junction of Routes 6 and 13. The white farmhouse with its green-trimmed gables faces open ground on one side and two wooded ravines on the other. Those ravines carry the names readers know: Balsam Hollow, where a footpath follows a brook under hemlock and white birch and is signed as Lover's Lane, and the Haunted Wood, whose trail runs east to the cellar depression of the Macneill homestead. Charlottetown is about forty minutes southeast by road; the red sandstone bluffs and dunes of Cavendish Beach are five minutes north.

Whose house it actually was. The farmhouse belonged to David Macneill and his unmarried sister Margaret, elderly cousins of Lucy Maud Montgomery's grandfather. Montgomery never lived here. She grew up a short walk away, at her grandparents' Macneill homestead, and used the neighbouring farm, its orchard and its two ravines as the physical model for the Cuthbert place when she wrote Anne of Green Gables in 1905. The book was rejected by several publishers before L.C. Page of Boston brought it out in 1908, and it has never been out of print since. Parks Canada furnishes the rooms today to match the novel rather than the Macneills who really lived here: Anne's east gable bedroom with a brown wincey dress and a puffed-sleeve alternative, Marilla's amethyst brooch set out on a bureau, a wood range in the kitchen and Matthew's small room off it.

How it became a museum. When Ottawa assembled shoreline for Prince Edward Island National Park in the mid-1930s, the Green Gables farm was folded into the acquisition, and the site has been federally run ever since — one of the very few literary house museums in Canada operated by the national park service. A fire in May 1997 gutted part of the interior; the building was restored and reopened. A larger visitor centre with exhibits on Montgomery's life, her journals and her tangled publishing career replaced an older facility at the end of the 2010s.

On screen, and where the cameras actually were. Almost none of the famous screen versions of Anne of Green Gables were shot at this house, which surprises visitors who arrive expecting to recognise specific camera angles:

• Sullivan Entertainment's 1985 CBC miniseries with Megan Follows, Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth was produced out of Ontario, where the farmhouse and most of Avonlea were played by southern Ontario properties; Prince Edward Island supplied shoreline and landscape footage.
• Road to Avonlea (1990-1996), from the same company, worked around Uxbridge, Ontario.
• Anne with an E (CBC and Netflix, 2017-2019) built its own Green Gables and its own Avonlea village as standing sets in southern Ontario, again returning to the Island mainly for coast.
• The 1934 RKO film was made on a California lot, and its young star changed her professional name to Anne Shirley afterwards.
• Akage no An (Nippon Animation, 1979), directed by Isao Takahata, turned the novel into a Japanese childhood staple and is the single largest reason Japanese travellers have been coming to Cavendish for four decades.

What you actually walk. The house tour is short — six or seven furnished rooms and a back kitchen — so the trails are where the time goes. Balsam Hollow Trail loops about 1.1 km through the ravine with boardwalk sections over the brook and interpretive panels quoting the journals. The Haunted Wood Trail runs a similar distance to the Site of L.M. Montgomery's Cavendish Home, which is separately owned by her descendants and charges its own small admission; only the stone foundation and the bookcase-lined outbuilding remain. Montgomery is buried in the Cavendish Community Cemetery a few minutes away, beside Route 6. The adjoining Green Gables golf course occupies fields that were part of the original farm.

Getting there and timing. There is no rail or bus service worth planning around; effectively everyone drives, and the parking lot sits directly off Route 6. The house operates on a seasonal schedule, roughly May into October, with the grounds and trails open beyond that; the interior is closed in deep winter. Coach groups from Charlottetown cruise-ship calls land mid-morning and again around two in the afternoon, and the house becomes a queue. Arriving at opening or after four in the afternoon changes the experience completely. The gable rooms are upstairs by a narrow historic staircase, so mobility is limited indoors, though the grounds and the first floor are manageable. September is the quiet reward: warm water still, empty trails, and the birches in the Haunted Wood turning.