A New Museum Honoring Anne of Green Gables Author Is in the Works

Anne of Green Gables creator Lucy Maud Montgomery died in 1942, but the author's memory lives on in her native Canada. Each year, hundreds of thousands of tourists visit sites like Green Gables Heritage Place, the 19th century farm in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island that inspired Montgomery’s fictional Green Gables farm. But soon, Smithsonian.com reports, another historical landmark—this one, in Norval, Ontario—will celebrate the beloved children’s book author.

CBC News reports that the L.M. Montgomery Heritage Society—which describes itself as an "international community of readers with a special interest" in Montgomery’s life—has purchased a brick home in the village near Toronto, where the author lived from 1926 and 1935. They plan to transform it into a museum/literary center dedicated to Montgomery.

The Norval house once belonged to two local Presbyterian churches, but two unidentified donors (one of whom is a Montgomery relative) gave the group $100,000 each. The L.M. Montgomery Heritage Society plans to pay off the rest of the site’s mortgage with a fundraising campaign.

Montgomery didn’t publish any Anne of Green Gables books while living in Norval (Rilla of Ingleside came out in 1921 and Anne of Windy Poplars was published in 1936), but she produced many other works there, including several novels, poems, and short stories. The author and her family eventually moved to Toronto, and today, several local sites honor the local literary hero, including the Lucy Maud Montgomery Heritage Garden; the Spirit of Maud Theater Company; and a now-closed local museum, which will reopen in an 1888 parish house that belonged to Montgomery’s husband, a Presbyterian minister.