Ministers Island

Ministers Island is an historic Canadian tidal island in New Brunswick's Passamaquoddy Bay near the town of St. Andrews.

The 200-hectare (490-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.

Ministers 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 Lakenvelder 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.