For many decades the famed Roosevelt family made a little piece of Canada their collective home. Campobello Island, New Brunswick, was the site of the family’s summer “cottage” enjoyed inter-generationally by the family. On this date in 1941, for example, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt arrived on the island to prepare the family cottage for the summer. She later wrote about it in her autobiography, This I Remember.
“Four of us worked hard, but also had a very pleasant time, between June 18 and 29, and I went back twice that summer,” she wrote, adding passages about her mother-in-law’s health. “When I went up in early July my mother-in-law, who wanted to get to her house on the island, went with me. I drove her up in my own little car and her maid and chauffeur followed with the bags in her car ... We stopped the second night at a summer place in the outskirts of Bath, Maine, and I ordered a light supper for her. I was rash enough to order lobster for the rest of us and was concerned when my mother-in-law insisted on eating the lobster as well as the light supper I had ordered.
We reached Campobello with no apparent ill effects. When I went back to Campobello in August, however, I felt she really was not well, and the doctor advised her to return to Hyde Park.”
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.