Myrtle Webb & Her World
Before the Diary / to 1924
Myrtle Macneill was thirteen years old in 1896 when she arrived at the farm that would become known as Green Gables, in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. She would live there for the next half century.
Cavendish now sees hundreds of thousands of tourists each summer, but at the time it was an ordinary farming community of about 150 people on the Island’s north shore. It had a post office, a one-room schoolhouse, and two churches.
Myrtle came with her mother, Ada, who had grown up in Cavendish but, as a single mother, had relocated them to New Brunswick just after Myrtle’s birth. They returned now to help take care of the farm of Ada’s elderly aunt Margaret and uncle David Macneill, siblings. The property was a handful: at 140 acres, it was one of the largest farms in Cavendish. There was substantial woodland, some fifteen fields of rich red soil, a sizable pond, a line of sand dunes announcing the Gulf of St Lawrence, and, at the centre of the property, a large and sturdy old farmhouse along with barns and outbuildings.
Ada married and moved to a nearby community a few years later, but Myrtle stayed on. She became good friends with her cousin Lucy Maud Montgomery, who, having been away at university or teaching the previous few years, now lived just half a kilometre down the road.
When visiting family in O’Leary, PEI, Myrtle met farmer Ernest Webb. (The story is that while working he cut his finger and was sent to the house, where she took care of him.) In 1905, they married on the Macneills’ farm. The newlyweds moved to O’Leary for a time but returned in 1909 to look after David and Margaret once again – this time n return for ownership of the farm.
In the meantime, cousin Maud experienced tremendous literary success. Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, was published to great international acclaim in 1908. Almost immediately, people began flocking to Cavendish to find the inspirations for Montgomery’s book – or, forgetting it was fiction, the actual setting. Since it was accepted that the author had modelled “Lover’s Lane” after a path in Ernest and Myrtle’s farm, they began to see some visitors. In time, the house itself and the entire property would grow to be associated with Green Gables.
The Webbs took all this in stride – Ernest even hung a sign directing sightseers to Lover’s Lane. It was peripheral to their real lives. They were busy raising five children: Marion (or “Peggy”), born in 1907; Keith, 1909; Anita (“Neta”), 1911; Lorraine (“Waine”), 1917; and Pauline (“P.J.”), 1920. They took care of David Macneill until his death in 1914, and continued to take care of Margaret, now fully blind. They were active in their community. They made a life from what they could grow and gather on their farm. And sell: they occasionally sold cattle, pigs, poultry, eggs, wood, hay, potatoes, berries, and other goods. But by the early 1920s, what with postwar inflation and declining agricultural prices on PEI, this semi-subsistence lifestyle was becoming more and more difficult. L.M. Montgomery, now living in Ontario, wrote in her journal that a letter from Myrtle Webb informed her that “They are having very hard times on PEI and she writes as if they might have to give up farming and try something else.”
The Webbs ultimately did not give up farming, but they did try something else. The interest generated by Anne of Green Gables convinced them to look to tourism for supplemental income, and so they started taking in summer boarders. And Myrtle Webb started a diary.
Family, Farm, & Tourism / 1924 – 1936
In April 1924 – at the age of 40 and part way through the calendar year – Myrtle Webb took up a pencil and began keeping a diary that she would maintain for the next 30 years. She would open each entry with the weather, followed by some short and pithy sentence fragments about the day, capturing where the Webbs visited or who visited them, what work they did, or anything else deemed noteworthy.
This was an important period in the Webbs’ lives. Aunt Margaret died. The five Webb children were growing up: whereas in 1924 the youngest, Pauline, was only four years old, by 1936 the two oldest, Marion and Keith, had found partners, were married, and launched. Myrtle suffered from debilitating illness for years; she was near death in 1931, before recovering. And as the Webbs’ home became ever more associated with Anne of Green Gables, their tourist operation took in more money and took up more of their time and energy, and the process repeated itself. The Webbs were the rare Canadian farm family whose financial situation improved during the Great Depression.
The period is also important in terms of the value of Myrtle’s diary. It is in these years that the cultural link between the Webb farm and Anne solidified. The diary documents the degree to which the growing celebrity of the farm did not just happen but was facilitated by the Webbs and, to some degree, by L.M. Montgomery herself. It is also in these years that the diary offers its most compelling snapshot of early twentieth century rural Canada. It chronicles in detail, for example, the Webbs’ semi-subsistent farm life, their reliance on wood for fuel and horses for transportation, and their involvement in the rural co-operative movement and in informal exchanged labour with community members. At the same time, it chronicles the unfolding of modernity, as evident in the Webbs’ growing engagement with the cash economy, mass tourism, and technologies such as the car and the radio.
National Park, World War / 1936 - 1945
In June 1936, Parks Canada staff travelling around PEI looking for a potential site for a national park came across a PEI Travel Bureau billboard directing travelers to “Green Gables.” They visited the Webb farm and liked they what they saw. The agency soon announced the creation of a park centred on Cavendish and the north shore. Facing certain expropriation, the Webbs sold their farm – but could keep living at Green Gables, with Ernest hired on as a park warden.
The years that followed were a whirlwind. The Webbs watched their farm fields transformed into a golf course. Their home was fixed up and modernized, finally getting plumbing and electricity. They welcomed more tourists than ever – although visiting for minutes or hours now rather than days or weeks. The Second World War quieted the national park, restoring some peace to the Webb household. But they faced their own losses: the death of Keith’s wife Margaret, of Myrtle’s mother Ada, of Marion’s son Ian, and of “Aunt Maud” Montgomery. And in the last days of 1945, the loss of their home: Parks Canada informed Myrtle and Ernest that, on two weeks’ notice, they would have to leave.
Myrtle faithfully maintained her diary throughout all this. Besides continuing to paint a rich portrait of rural life, modernity, and the crystallizing celebrity of Green Gables, her writing provides a rare behind-the-scenes look at a national park’s establishment and development, including a detailed description of the physical changes that her home and farm underwent. And because Green Gables became a haven during the war for off-duty servicemen training on the Island, the diary offers what is arguably the most captivating account in existence of a national park in wartime.
But as much as the diary draws the reader outward in these years – making connections to national and international affairs – it remains the story of Myrtle Webb and her family. The diary’s park and wartime years show a woman getting older and leading a less hectic life, more healthy and seemingly at peace. Myrtle’s life is more rooted at Green Gables than ever, until the moment it isn’t.
The Bend in the Road / 1946 - 1954
After the exodus from Green Gables, Myrtle and Ernest Webb spent more than a year wandering from one of their children’s guest rooms to another, figuring out what was to come next. Then Myrtle turned the page of her diary and wrote, “May 1947 The Old Parsonage.” They moved just down the road from Green Gables to a house said to have had the same builder, using the same plan: it was a mirror image of their old home.
