Minister's Island
 |
|
| Geography | |
|---|---|
| Area | 2.8 km2 (1.1 sq mi) |
| Administration | |
Ministers Island is an historic Canadian island in New Brunswick's Passamaquoddy Bay near the town of St. Andrews.
The 280-hectare (690-acre) island stands several hundred metres offshore immediately northeast of the town and is a geographical novelty in that it is accessible at low tide by a wide gravel bar suitable for vehicular travel.
Minister’s Island became famous in the last decade of the nineteenth century as the summer home of Sir William Van Horne, the president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. By the time of Van Horne’s death in 1915, the island had been transformed into a small Xanadu, sporting a sandstone mansion furnished in the most lavish late Edwardian manner, manicured grounds, scenic roads, greenhouses turning out exotic fruits and vegetables, as well as a breeding farm producing prize-winning Clydesdale horses and Dutch Belted cattle. It was the most spectacular of many palatial summer homes in St. Andrews, which since the creation of the St. Andrews Land Company in 1888 and the arrival of Van Horne in 1891, had become a watering place of note on the Canadian east coast.
Consquamcook or Quanoscumcook Island had been inhabited by Passamaquoddy Indians centuries earlier, traces of their occupation evidenced by the presence of shell middens. Today the Minister's Island Pre-Columbian ("pre-contact") shell middens are designated as a National Historic Site and commemorated by a cairn.
The Island did not see white residents until the arrival in 1777 of John Hanson and Ephraim Young. Traces of early European buildings were excavated in the 1970s. Having received location tickets in recognition of their service in the Revolutionary War (Hanson fought with Wolfe in Quebec), Hanson and Young set out from Salem, Massachusetts in a whaling boat and eventually found their way to St. Andrews, the first Loyalists to arrive in the area. At that time St. Andrews consisted of little more than a trading post operated by two trappers from Saint John, along with a mainly ceremonial native presence. Having decided to settle on Consquamcook Island (or Chamcook Island, as it later was called), they cleared fields, raised families, and for a few tough years were forced to subsist almost entirely on shellfish and what they could bring down with their guns. With the arrival of the main United Empire Loyalist influx to the area in 1783, there was some concern that they might be ousted from their island by the new settlers, so they petitioned Governor General Carleton in Halifax for title to the Island but were informed that a prior application had been received from Samuel Osborn, Captain of the warship Arethusa, then stationed at St. Andrews for protection of the refugees. There is a legend, probably true, that Osborn was forced to use his ships cannons in some sort of not-so-friendly target practice to persuade the squatters to leave the premises. There is another story that Osborne, in cahoots with the Town’s new rector, Samuel Andrews of Connecticut, got Hanson drunk and persuaded him to sign over his property to the Minister. This is certainly not true. as Hanson and Young had in fact no legal title to the Island, and the deed transferring the Island from Osborn to Andrews is dated 1791, seven years after the two unfortunate settlers had left the Island.
...
Wikipedia