New Brunswick | Escape to the quiet island of Campobello

Campobello Island is part of New Brunswick, but to get there by car, you have to go through Maine. The island’s most famous seasonal resident came from the United States: former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Stroll.

Simon Chabot
The Press

(Campobello, New Brunswick) The customs officer could not believe that a car registered in Quebec showed up that morning in Campobello. “I come from Ontario, and I had never heard of this island before coming here! “, she launched. However, the border services officer is used to seeing American tourists pass by, sometimes coming from the other side of the continent to visit the former summer residence of 32^e President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the main tourist attraction on the island of just over 800 inhabitants.

The Roosevelt Cottage, virtually unchanged since the 1920s, now sits at the heart of an international park managed by both Canada and the United States. Access to the residence, as to the park, is free.

During the twenty-minute guided tour, you can admire certain objects that belonged to the president, who spent his childhood summers there, including a painting that once hung in the Oval office and the magnificent stove “President” model, made by the Bélangers of Montmagny, and offered by Eleanor Roosevelt to her husband.

Visitors will also see the room where the young politician was bedridden in 1921, struck down by polio – according to doctors at the time – which deprived him of the use of his legs for the rest of his life. After illness, Roosevelt, who served as president from 1933 until his death in 1945, rarely returned to Campobello.

A nearby cottage houses the Prince Cafe, which serves light meals at good prices.

Nature in the spotlight

The greatest treasure of the park is undoubtedly its nature reserve of 2800 acres. Hiking trails and small dirt roads lead here to pebble beaches, coastal headlands and the pond where the former president liked to take a dip to cool off.

At Liberty Point, which is accessible by car, in good weather the gaze extends to the cliffs of Grand Manan Island to the south and to the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse in Maine to the west. On Raccoon Beach, the waves make the large, round pebbles sing as they crash over them.

In addition to a lighthouse built in 1855, Mulholland Point hosts a small marine life interpretation center managed by the international park. Visitors also observe seals in the strait that separates Campobello from the American city of Lubec.

Herring’s Cove Provincial Park, with its tree-lined campground and sandy beach, borders Roosevelt Campobello International Park.

Calm regained

Further on the island, a few quiet hamlets follow one another, such as Welshpool and Wilson’s Beach, with their small harbors where old fishing boats are sometimes left abandoned. Near the only school on the island, each high school graduate is entitled to their photo on a lamppost. Campobello also has a single grocery store. And she sometimes struggles to get food delivered by ferry. The maritime connection with the rest of New Brunswick is also seasonal, which caused some concern for the islanders when the borders were closed.

At the very end of Campobello, the Head Harbor Lighthouse is built on a rock connected to the mainland at low tide. A bilingual sign — well, almost, the translation being creative to say the least — warns the curious that the tide in this part of the Bay of Fundy can rise at breakneck speed… and force them to spend eight hours on the side of the lighthouse, cut off from the rest of the world. Swimming in cold waters to reach dry land? Forget that.

Going around Campobello, which is barely 15 km by 5 km, it is hard to imagine the crowd that reigned here every summer from the end of the 19^e at the beginning of the XX^e century, when a group of American businessmen, including the father of Franklin D. Roosevelt, built three large hotels on the island where hundreds of wealthy families from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Montreal and Ottawa. The last hotel was demolished over 100 years ago. Since then, the island has managed to maintain its regained calm.

Contemplative travelers won’t mind.