Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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April 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
April 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 2
When in 1783 it became clear that a band of American rebels had succeeded in their insurrection against King George, Robert Pagan and 443 of his neighbors in Castine, Maine, did the only thing loyal subjects of the Crown could do: they dismantled their houses and pubs, board by board and nail by nail, piled them onto schooners, and sailed for the northern Crown colonies. There, at the confluence of the St. Croix River and Passamaquoddy Bay, just a coin’s throw across the Maritime border of what is now Maine, the Penobscot Loyalists shook the dust of revolution from their heels and secured a piece of the Empire. Financed by the royal treasury and carefully laid out in advance by George III’s deputy surveyor general of Nova Scotia, St. Andrews would become a paragon of royal benevolence and Loyalist industry.
Two centuries later St. Andrews is still a paragon, a town of redolent English gardens, gleaming white churches, and classic houses abiding in the shade of hoary elms and chestnuts. Though born as a Loyalist Canaan and nurtured as a tumultuous mercantile hub in the age of sail, St. Andrews emerged from the nineteenth century not as a commercial prodigy but as a resort, a Maritime haunt for the famous, the near famous, and the indisputably rich from both sides of the border. The thread that binds all three eras, and the enduring appeal of this community on the cusp of the Old World and the New Republic, is a varied architecture with a distinctive vernacular tang, set in a region cut whole from the quarry of North America—one of the last areas on the Eastern seaboard still bearing some semblance to what John Cabot found in 1497.
The Penobscot Loyalists set ashore beside the site of what is now Market Wharf, which hooks like a great fish barb far into the bay from the heart of Water Street, the town’s main byway. Come by sea or come by land, Water Street is a surprise; few places in North America have better preserved themselves against the caustic flow of time. Across from the wharf your eye catches the 1881 Shiretown Inn, originally the Kennedy Hotel and one of the two oldest summer hotels in Canada. A young Franklin Delano Roosevelt stayed here on an overnight yachting jaunt from the family cottage on nearby Campobello Island. To your immediate left is the plain brick custom-house, which once employed the father of Oliver Goldsmith, namesake and grandnephew of the eighteenth-century AngloIrish poet. Young Goldsmith published the first book of poetry by a native Canadian, its title work a paean to his Loyalist birthplace, St. Andrews. He called it The Rising Village, an allusion to his uncle’s 1770 masterpiece, The Deserted Village. Now walk to Water Street and glance left. A block or so down is the Dunn-McQuoid house, St. Andrews’s first two-story building,