New Brunswick’s Campobello Island is one of the most well-known pieces of Canadian geography. It was there, of course, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his family had their summer home. Decades after FDR’s death in 1945, the famous property was named the Roosevelt Campobello International Park that is today jointly administered by Canada and the United States. It serves as a permanent reminder of the partnership and friendship that exists between our two nations.
Over the years the island has received many distinguished visitors and on this date in 1967 it was Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who participated in a ceremony at Campobello. She was there to officially open and dedicate the international park’s new information centre. “Here in this corner of the North American Continent there has been established this joint domain -- the Roosevelt Campobello International Park -- a symbol of the firm and enduring friendship of our nations,” Her Majesty said in her speech that historic day. “We live again in times of strife and passion, and people perhaps tend to forget the simple truth, that we are all brothers one of another, here to serve the world but not to master it. If we can see through the fog of our differences to that truth, then we may indeed make a better world.”
You can read her remarks in full below.
Her Majesty the Queen Mother: In 1939, that beautiful summer overshadowed by the thought of war, the King and I spent a brief and happy time with President and Mrs. Roosevelt at Hyde Park.
Today, 28 years later, as Britannia made the passage across Passamaquoddy Bay, through the narrow waters between New Brunswick and Maine and to this fair Island of Campobello, I have been remembering our meeting.
For each of us memories are personal things, of places and people, of strength and weakness, of joy and sorrow.
There are few human beings whose service to mankind has been so noble that a whole world -- a world indeed of strangers, remembers them in a personal sense. Such a man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
We know that he spent the summers of his youth at Campobello, and that here he was struck by crippling illness. And it is most fitting that the memory of so gallant and illustrious an American should also be honoured on the Canadian Island which he loved.
Here in this corner of the North American Continent there has been established this joint domain -- the Roosevelt Campobello International Park -- a symbol of the firm and enduring friendship of our nations.
We live again in times of strife and passion, and people perhaps tend to forget the simple truth, that we are all brothers one of another, here to serve the world but not to master it. If we can see through the fog of our differences to that truth, then we may indeed make a better world.
I am glad to see with us, this afternoon, members of the family of Franklin Roosevelt, and of his wife, Eleanor, in her own right a beloved ambassador of the United States of America
Through this building will pass many people from many lands. They will, I pray, draw inspiration from this place of friendship. And now it is my great pleasure to declare the Reception Centre open.
You can watch a video of Her Majesty on the island at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A129M-LCxpI
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.