How old traditions meld with modern dreams in quaint Victoria, PEI.

“Anne dropped on her knees and gazed out into the June morning, her eyes glistening with delight. Oh, wasn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t it a lovely place? Suppose she wasn’t really going to stay here! She would imagine she was. There was scope for imagination here….” ~Anne of Green Gables, chapter 4

In Bristol, England, sometime around the turn of this century, two sisters named Caitlin and Erin McQueen read the words above by L.M. Montgomery—went on to read all the words written about Anne of Green Gables—and wondered what it would be like to live where Anne did. To live on Prince Edward Island.

Caitlin, now 20, says she began reading the L.M. Montgomery books around the age of seven, after receiving them as gifts from her paternal grandmother.

“My sister and I actually wanted to have the life that Anne of Green Gables had,” she says. It’s a wish that came true this past summer, thanks to their father’s Canadian citizenship.

“My dad was born in Halifax and he lived there until he was four,” Caitlin says. “He wanted to show us where he was from. We knew we also had to come over to Prince Edward Island.”

That visit in 2008 just happened to coincide with the centenary celebrations of the publication of Anne of Green Gables. “We did the tour, all the Anne of Green Gables things,” Caitlin says. And they stayed in Victoria-by-the-Sea, a village located on the south shore between Borden-Carleton and Charlottetown, tucked away on a cove near the Westmoreland River.

Being on the Island was surreal at first, Caitlin says. “I remember saying to Erin, ‘I know I’ve never been here before but I felt like I am coming home. I feel like I am supposed to be here. It is a dream come true.’”

Just as the Anne books had charmed the two girls growing up in England, the village charmed their parents, who had been toying with the idea of a quieter, simpler life beyond England. During a return trip to Victoria the following year, Andy and Tania McQueen purchased a waterfront lot in a newly created subdivision called Dunrovin Shores.

The family immigrated to Canada in August 2012 and this past June, moved into their new home overlooking Victoria’s harbour. The dream inspired by one fictional Islander was made possible by the dream of another Islander, this time very real.

Subdividing his inheritance

Donald Wood settles down at the dining room table nestled into the round space created by one of two turrets rising up from the large century home he knows as Dunrovin. He gazes upon a large photo of the sprawling homestead as it looked in the 1950s when his grandfather, Howard (“HB”) Wood, maintained a mixed farm and, along with his wife, Katherine (“Kay”), rented out several housekeeping cabins to tourists. He hung the photo where he would see it every day, to act as his muse.

For it is Donald who made what some might consider the shocking decision to subdivide what was left of the inheritance from his father and grandmother in order to restore Dunrovin—and the housekeeping cabins—to their former glory. The land forms a half-circle around the village, resulting in two separate subdivisions, Dunrovin Shores and Dunrovin Acres.

“The purpose of the subdividing is to pay for restoring the family homestead and the cottages,” he explains. “The goal is to put everything back the way it was when I was young.”

The house, built in 1910, is part of the 100-acre farm HB Wood purchased in May 1929 from the Palmer family, which had deep ties to the area. James Baldwin Palmer was the estate manager for the Earl of Westmoreland, granted the 10,000 acre Lot 29, created when the Island was surveyed in the 1760s.

“Grandfather always wanted a house by the shore with a grandfather clock and a fireplace. That had been his goal in life for many years,” Donald explains. “The Palmers had some bad luck, I guess, a couple of deaths in the family close together and this place came up for sale by auction. My grandfather bought it for the princely sum, back then, of $6,000.”

Since restoring the house and cottages will take a current-day princely sum, Donald, who works in security at Charlottetown Airport, opted to sell most of the land that was left of the original parcel. “We’d been trying to renovate the house so Grandmother could return home with nursing care, but it wasn’t finished in time,” says Donald.

Although his grandmother died in 2007, Donald and his family weren’t able to move into the house themselves until this past July, because it needed a lot of work. He admits that his grandmother wasn’t supportive of his idea to sell the land, but came to accept it after learning the house would be restored.

“There was also some resistance in the community from people who felt we were selling out, but we’d had people drive up the laneway for 50 years asking if we’d sell off a parcel of land,” says Donald. “Grandfather once told me they’d complained for years that the village couldn’t grow because the Woods wouldn’t sell any land. So you couldn’t satisfy everybody.”

For this soft-spoken father of four, this is the thought that adds fuel to his ambition: “Oh, we’d love to have the cottages back because we had them as a child. I used to come over and play with a different set of kids every week, and I’d love to have that for my own kids.”

A sea of change

It could be argued that Donald Wood is simply following the local tradition of dividing farmland into lots in order to create new living space. In 1819, James Palmer divided the vast lot he managed into farms and it was his 10th son, named Donald, who created the village of Victoria when he subdivided a rectangle of land on his own farm.

While Victoria-by-the-Sea, a municipality with its own official plan and subdivision bylaws, extends well beyond the square boundaries of the village, it is the village that attracts visitors; with its distinctive grid pattern of six main streets and heritage homes built on small lots, it has a quaint, storybook quality that has proven attractive to both permanent and seasonal residents.

At the time of Confederation, Victoria was PEI’s fourth busiest seaport with an emerging tourist trade for people looking for seaside vacations; with the loss of the shipping industry after the Second World War, the village morphed from a seaport to seaside attraction. It now offers visitors an eclectic collection of shops and restaurants, and a summer theatre festival in the historic community hall, constructed between 1912 and 1914.

For some, it’s been quite the sea of change.

“There’s some friction...”

“If it wasn’t for the water and the stores on the wharf, Victoria would be nothing. We’d be dead.”

Born in 1937, Vince Keough has witnessed most of the changes to the village since it was a busy seaport.

“There were three wharves at one time,” he says. “In the wintertime, when I was a young fella, all the houses were full. Now you won’t get 25 people in the village in winter.”

Now 76, and the village’s wharf manager for the past 20 years, he is both blunt and realistic about the changes that have occurred in the village.

“Things didn’t change that quick. Just went along with it,” he says. “The village goes together but there’s some friction. She’s not always as quaint as you think she is.”

He recalls a plan for a three-story hotel. Not only was it going to be built on the waterfront, it was going to be built in front of Vince’s home, on Water Street.

“A few of us fought against it,” he says.

It’s the delicate line a village like Victoria must walk: To honour its heritage and history yet remain vibrant and viable. Whether it’s the location or the people, or a combination, Victoria has been able to recreate itself and weather the conflicts that arise with change.

As far as restaurateur Eugène Sauvé is concerned, good development is good for the village and its businesses. After arriving in the village in the late 1980s to work at the Victoria Playhouse, he bought a house and a business, running the Landmark Cafe across from the theatre since 1990. He says a development like Donald Wood’s subdivision doesn’t scare him.

“The inner core of the village will keep its unique characteristics,” he says, “and many of the people building in either development are good customers. How do you say, ‘I want this to stay this way?’”

Just as the Landmark Cafe used to be Craig’s Grocery Store, Island Chocolates used to be the home of the Wright Brothers General Store. New business ideas, many of them catering to visitors, have given the children who grew up in the village a reason to stay.

Emma Gilbert now runs the chocolate factory her parents started in 1987, Island Chocolates Company, with her mother, Linda, and older brother Eric. Although she considers herself fortunate to be able to make a living in her home community, she admits she has mixed feelings about the subdivision.

“I don’t like change that much but from a business perspective, it’s more people coming in,” says the 33-year-old chocolatier. “It would be great if more people would stay here year-round; we need that.”

Reclaiming their lives

It’s one thing to become a full-time resident because you have a business to run in the village but what if moving to the village means starting over? Andrew and Tania McQueen had well-established careers in Bristol.

“Both of us left full-time jobs so it was a leap,” admits Tania, an occupational therapist now working part-time at the hospital in Charlottetown. “It’s going to take a few years to really get settled and find our way.

“But we needed to change our lifestyle because we both worked very hard. My husband has had cancer so that was the big thing; we needed to shake things up a bit. That’s really why we’re here: we needed to reclaim our lives.” A patent lawyer, Andrew works part-time at a bookstore in Summerside, but has already connected with a company in Ottawa to do remote work in his area of expertise.

Living the dream?

If a subdivision seems contrary to the historical ambience of the village, the idea of rebuilding the year-round population seems to suppress any misgivings.

Andrew McQueen says one of the first questions he was asked after moving in was whether he was going to be a year-round resident. “Perhaps they see that as a commitment to the village,” he says.

Caitlin’s summer job at a gift shop on the wharf gave her an opportunity to meet many of the locals. “People would hear my accent and say ‘You’re the British person who lives in that big yellow house’,” she laughs. “I had a lot of people say they’re excited for the subdivision to be finished and the population of the village being bigger—especially the younger people.”

But there’s a more important question to be asked that has nothing to do with the village, or its fascinating history, or its growing pains: Is this new life on PEI living up to the childhood imaginings back in Bristol?

“I’m sure there’s something in the books about Anne receiving her manuscript or she gets a letter back,” Erin says, likely thinking of Anne’s attempt to get a short story published in Anne of the Island, “and as I was walking through the village the other day and opening my post, I was thinking it was an Anne moment.”

The sisters look at each other and giggle. “And raspberry cordial still excites us!”

“We still have moments of disbelief,” Caitlin says with a wide, happy smile, “when we walk around and think ‘We actually live on Prince Edward Island.’ It’s so strange because we dreamed of it all the time when we were kids.”