Anne Founds the Avonlea Village Improvement Society

Anne Shirley’s campaign to improve Avonlea’s public spaces turned an idea discussed among young people into an organized village society, with Gilbert Blythe as president and Anne as secretary. The Avonlea Village Improvement Society began with ambitious plans to make the settlement more attractive and to educate public sentiment; its first concrete effort, repairing and painting Avonlea Hall, showed both the promise of collective work and the friction between civic ideals, local opinion, and practical execution.

Origins and purpose

The proposal grew out of a conversation among girls and boys at the last Debating Club. Anne explained that similar organizations existed in many villages, and that Mr. Allan and Mrs. Allan approved of the idea. When Rachel Lynde warned that people disliked being improved, Anne distinguished between reforming people and improving Avonlea itself. She pointed to the derelict house on Levi Boulter’s upper farm as one possible target: persuading its owner to remove it would make the settlement more attractive. The example gave the plan a concrete local purpose, while also anticipating the difficulty of asking residents to act for the public good.

Anne was determined to establish the society, and Gilbert shared her enthusiasm. The two had already discussed and planned improvements so extensively that they could imagine an ideal Avonlea, even before the village had taken action. The other prospective members were drawn partly by the prospect of meetings and their social pleasures; at first, Anne and Gilbert were the only ones with a clear sense of what the improvements might be. The organization thus began with a mixture of civic ambition, shared sociability, and an ideal vision that had yet to be tested against the village’s habits and resources.

Organization and first plans

The Avonlea Village Improvement Society soon became an established organization. Gilbert was elected president, Fred Wright vice-president, Anne secretary, and Diana Barry treasurer. Members were to meet every other week in one another’s homes. Since the season was already too advanced for many physical improvements, they planned to prepare a campaign for the following summer, gather and discuss ideas, write and read papers, and, in Anne’s formulation, cultivate public support. The society’s work therefore combined prospective projects with discussion and persuasion: beautification would depend not only on labor and money but also on changing what the community considered worth doing.

The group was promptly nicknamed the Improvers, and its plans became a subject of mockery. Elisha Wright suggested that it might more properly be called a Courting Club; Hiram Sloane spread an absurd rumor that the members meant to line the roads with geraniums. Levi Boulter imagined that the society would demand that residents rebuild their houses to its specifications. Other jokes transformed improvement into unwanted interference, from shoveling down the church hill to prescribing trimmed whiskers, hand-painted milk stands, or lace curtains in cowstables. The exaggerations show how easily a public-minded proposal could be recast as an attempt to dictate private taste. The ridicule stung the members, but it did not stop them from beginning the work they could manage that fall.

The hall campaign and its setback

At the society’s second meeting, held in the Barry parlor, Oliver Sloane moved to start a subscription for re-shingling and painting Avonlea Hall. Julia Bell seconded the motion despite feeling that the act was not quite ladylike; Gilbert put it to a vote, the members approved it unanimously, and Anne entered the decision in the minutes. Jane Andrews was appointed committee chair. She then appointed Gertie Pye, Gilbert, Anne, Diana, and Fred Wright to the committee. The canvassing was divided by route: Anne and Diana took the Newbridge road, Gilbert and Fred the White Sands road, and Jane and Gertie the Carmody road. Gilbert explained that the Pyes lived along the Carmody route and would be unlikely to contribute unless one of their own approached them. Even the fundraising plan thus depended on local relationships and knowledge of whom to ask.

The campaign’s first major result was a public embarrassment. A mistake involving the paint left the hall blue, and the Improvers feared that the failure would end their society. Instead of laughing, Avonlea residents were angry that their contributions had been spent on a result they disliked. Public indignation fell especially on the Pyes: Roger Pye and John Andrew had mishandled the matter, while Joshua Pye, the painter, maintained that he had been hired to paint the hall and had not been told what color to use. After consulting Peter Sloane, a magistrate, the society paid him; Peter advised that the painter could not be held responsible on the account given, though he agreed that the result was a disgrace and that the hall looked awful. The episode turned an improvement project into a dispute over instructions, responsibility, payment, and shared expectations. It did not dissolve the organization, but it made the hall’s conspicuous color a continuing constraint on what the members could afford to attempt.

Continuing work and civic limits

The society continued to plan improvements after the hall campaign. Members considered petitioning the school trustees to put a fence around the school grounds and discussed planting ornamental trees by the church, subject to available funds. Anne pointed out that starting another subscription made little sense while the hall remained blue. A carefully selected committee also approached Levi Boulter about the ruin on his upper farm, but he bluntly refused to have it interfered with. These efforts returned to the practical challenges visible in Anne’s original proposal: public benefit required money, cooperation, and a willingness by private owners or authorities to act.

A later threat to rent the road fence around Judson Parker’s farm to a patent-medicine company for advertisements tested the society’s opposition to commercial intrusion into the village landscape. Anne, Jane, and Diana visited Parker to argue against the plan. He initially refused to let sentiment govern his business, then offered only to restrict the advertisements to colors he considered tasteful and to forbid blue. Afterward he told Anne that he had decided to humor the society’s prejudice against patent-medicine advertisements and that the fence arrangement was off. Anne gave no explanation to the other members. She had overheard Parker speaking with Jerry Corcoran about a political favor connected to a debt for a pair of harrows, and she would not bargain with a man who might sell his vote; Parker’s account to her was that he had only been testing Corcoran and intended to vote as usual. The episode leaves the society’s apparent victory entangled with private interests and political maneuvering rather than establishing that its arguments alone changed Parker’s mind.

The Avonlea Village Improvement Society therefore emerged as more than a beautification club, though its projects stayed modest and its influence uncertain. Its fortnightly meetings, minutes, committees, petitions, and subscriptions gave Anne’s ideal of a prettier Avonlea a practical civic form. At the same time, the blue hall, Boulter’s refusal, public jokes, and the contested fence proposal exposed the limits of organized good intentions. The society’s significance lies in that tension: it made improvement a shared subject of planning and debate, while showing how much depended on money, consent, and the complicated motives of the people whose cooperation it sought.