Crossing Borders (July/August 2001 | Volume: 52, Issue: 5)

Crossing Borders

AH article image

Authors: Carla Davidson

Historic Era: Era 8: The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

July/August 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 5

 

New Brunswick, the oldest province in Eastern Canada, shares a long border and just as long a history with the state of Maine. Over centuries, the region saw plots, raids, and wars, as France and Britain and later the nascent United States fought for control of a land rich in the bounties of forest and the sea.

Roosevelt Campobello International Park, on Campobello Island at the southwestern tip of the province, reflects the more harmonious Canadian-American relations of the last century. At the heart of the park, the carefully preserved summer home of Franklin Roosevelt draws about 150,000 visitors each year to a patch of “Canadian soil that has become part of America’s heritage,” as the late Sen. Edmund Muskie once put it.

You can reach Campobello by ferry or automobile from either country. My route took me from the Canadian resort community of St. Andrews, along a fragrantly spruce-fringed route with vistas of Passamaquoddy Bay gleaming at every turn. This involved four border crossings: from Canada to the United States, then back to Canada as we crossed the bridge to Campobello, then the same trip in reverse. Each time we showed our passports and fielded a different set of questions: 1.) Any alcohol, tobacco, or firearms? 2.) Where are you going, and did you make any purchases in the United States? 3.) Is this your car? 4. How many passengers in your car?

One wonders if the original investors in Campobello from Gilded Age America, Roosevelt’s father among them, encountered even as much as this mild interrogation when they traveled by rail and ship to the island they planned to develop as a luxurious resort. Roosevelt was a one-year-old when he first came here in 1883, and he returned almost every summer after that until polio struck him here in 1921. By then, he and Eleanor had moved from his mother’s house on the island to one of their own, which was called a “cottage” despite its 34 rooms.

This is a place of eclectic and rambling comfort, unpretentious in its simply furnished bedrooms, some 17 in all, its splotchy flowered wallpaper, and its airy living room where chintz-covered easy chairs cluster to provide magnificent vistas of the bay.

 
 
 

As a boy, FDR learned from the local fishermen to love and manage the moods of the wild tides that pour into the Bay of Fundy. When he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he sometimes arrived aboard a destroyer. Presenting an image that reads like a metaphor for Roosevelt’s presidency, Stephen Muskie, the senator’s elder son and the author of a book about the island, writes, “Although it was against naval regulations, he persuaded the captain to let him take the helm and piloted the ship at full speed ahead through fog-bound waters.”

BRITISH SYMPATHIZERS IN MAINE PUT THEIR HOUSES ABOARD SCHOONERS AND SAILED WITH THEM TO ST. ANDREWS.