10/16/2026
The island does not disappear high tide, but the road to the island certainly does
Twice a day, the road to this island disappears under the ocean. Ministers Island — a 200-hectare tidal island in Passamaquoddy Bay — can only be reached at low tide, when a wide gravel bar emerges from the sea and visitors literally drive across the ocean floor to get there. Miss the tide, and you are staying for dinner.
The island's fame comes from its most flamboyant resident: Sir William Van Horne, the president who built the Canadian Pacific Railway. In 1891 he bought the island and spent a decade raising Covenhoven, a fifty-room sandstone mansion in the grandest Edwardian style — seventeen bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, walls hung with his own paintings. Around it he built a gentleman farmer's Xanadu: a great chateau-style barn for prize Clydesdale horses and Dutch Belted cattle, a round bathhouse with a tidal swimming pool, greenhouses growing peaches and grapes, and miles of manicured carriage roads.
Van Horne was a railway titan, an artist, a gardener, and an engineer all at once — and his island was his masterpiece. Today it is a National Historic Site, and the ritual of the visit is unchanged in a century: check the tide table, drive the bar, tour the mansion, and leave before the sea takes the road back.
It is the only commute in Canada dictated entirely by the moon.
The Passamaquoddy people knew the island long before Van Horne — they called it Quanoscumcook — and Loyalist settlers followed. But it was Van Horne's arrival in 1891 that made St. Andrews itself: his wealthy friends followed him to the mainland, building the grand summer colony that made the town Canada's first seaside resort. The island, the town, and the railway are all chapters of one man's improbable biography.
Would you trust the tide table — or would you be the one waving at the mainland?
