The episode was actually based on a short story that Lucy Maud Montgomery penned in 1906.  On Dec. 2, she wrote, “I’ve been jogging on of late in a rather uninteresting rut.  But a nice thing happened last Tuesday.  Everybody’s accepted a short story of mine—“The Quarantine At Alexander Abraham’s”—and sent me a hundred dollars for it.  Everybody’s is one of the big magazines and to appear in it is a sign that you are getting somewhere.”

Everybody’s Magazine was founded about seven years before Montgomery sent her manuscript.  It quickly earned a reputation for being committed to investigative journalism and by 1903 had a circulation of about 150,000.

Here’s a direct transcript from Montgomery’s short story.

“Alexander Abraham's place was about three miles along the White Sands road. I knew the house as soon as I came to it by its neglected appearance. It needed paint badly; the blinds were crooked and torn; weeds grew up to the very door. Plainly, there was no woman about that place. Still, it was a nice house, and the barns were splendid. My father always said that when a man's barns were bigger than his house it was a sign that his income exceeded his expenditure. So it was all right that they should be bigger; but it was all wrong that they should be trimmer and better painted. Still, thought I, what else could you expect of a woman hater?”

To find out more about where this episode was filmed, click here!

Source:
The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery- Volume 1: 1889-1910

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAeverybodys.htm

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/montgomery/chronicles/chronicles-08.html