Anne of Green Cottage Country
Who knew? Lucy Maud Montgomery had a sweet spot for Bala
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables. Both the writer and her works are synonymous with P.E.I.; of Montgomery’s 21 novels, all but one take place-at least in part—on the island. The outlier is 1926’s The Blue Castle, a then-risqué rom-com about an aging spinster who falls in love with a mysterious outcast. It is set in cottage country’s very own Muskoka.
The Blue Castle’s fictional town of “Deerwood” is based on Bala, Ontarion, where Montgomery and her family arrived in July 1922 for a two-week stay at the Roselawn Lodge. (The lodge burned down in 1941.) A compulsive diarist and pho-tographer, Montgomery thoroughly documented her time in Bala. Muskoka was a “fairyland,” she wrote in her journals, “beautiful at all times, but especially at night when the river silvers under the moon.” One entry includes a photograph of Montgomery, smiling wide in a floating skiff, captioned “Dreaming.” And on July 30 of that year, she wrote, “Bala is a dear spot-somehow I love it. It has the flavour of home.”
Montgomery fell madly for cottage country just like the rest of us-including Linda Jackson-Hutton, and her husband, Jack, long-time fans of the author. The couple met in Bala Bay and were later married. After honeymooning in P.E.I., they were shocked to learn Canada’s most famous author had vacationed in their own little town. Moreover, the tourist home where Montgomery and her family had eaten their meals during their Bala visit came up for sale. So, in 1990, they bought the heritage frame house to restore to Maud’s day and turned it into a museum filled it to the brim with Anne Shirley books, dolls, collectables, and other memorabilia, including a first impression, first-edition copy of Anne of Green Gables and one of the world’s largest Green Gables doll houses (it takes up the surface of a dining room table).
“The museum is interactive and hands on,” says Linda. That’s much to the delight of the more than 150,000 fans-from all around the globe-who have trekked to Bala. “There’s so much to see and do,” she says. “No one gets out in under one-and-a-half hours.”
