Dareth Thorne, secretary-treasurer of the Van Horne Estate on Ministers Island, looks at artifacts that may be estate originals.

24 May 2011

Group Wants to Bring Lost Treasures to Island

St. Andrews New Brunswick - There's an international hunt underway for items taken nearly four decades ago from a lavish island estate in the Bay of Fundy that once belonged to a Canadian railroad baron.
 
Priceless paintings, furniture, and historical artifacts that once belonged to Sir William C. Van Horne are gone, although the only crime here is the low price for which some the items were sold.
 
In 1976, auctioneer Russell Bond sold off more than 700 items from Van Horne's Ministers Island estate, sending them across the continent.
 
But now Dareth Thorne is on the case, along with fellow members of the Van Horne Estate on Ministers Island Inc., a non-profit group managing the island, to collect as many of the lost items as possible. The hunt is part of a bigger project to restore the island and its opulent but crumbling buildings back to their former 19th century stature.
 
"Every so often we get inquiries from people who have items but they're not quite ready to do it yet," said Thorne, secretary-treasurer of the Van Horne Estate. The search started in earnest a few years ago, she said, when CTV ran a story about the non-profit's interest in finding the items that were auctioned off.
 
"We had four or five calls within the hour," she said, although since then donations have only trickled in.
 
The group held an open house last week to kick start the summer tourist season and send out fresh calls for people to donate auctioned off treasures.
 
"I'm hoping we're going to hear from more locals, because there still has to be more stuff around here," Thorne said.
 
Walking through the mansion on Ministers Island, it's quickly apparent that nearly all the items that were once within its walls of now peeling plaster are gone. Only a few odds and ends, paintings, beds, and dressers remain.
 
Despite everything that is missing, Andreas Haun, president of the Van Horne Estate, insisted that Ministers Island is still filled with magic.
 
"Once you're over there it just gets in your blood," Haun said. "You just fall in love with it."
 
No expense was spared in the construction of the mansion, which was completed in 1901. Van Horne was an enormously wealthy man who was in charge of building Canada's transcontinental railway in the late 1800s and had money to spare for the construction of his summer home that he called Covenhoven.
 
The mansion has 50 rooms, 17 bathrooms, and two libraries. The billiard room, adorned with the busts of an elk and bison, is still home to a three-tonne wooden pool table that was too heavy to be carted off after the auction in 1977.
 
There's a circular bathhouse at the edge of the island with stairs that spiral down to the red rocks on the Fundy shore. Van Horne had a 15-metre-long pool blasted from the rocks that would fill with ocean water on each ebb of the tide.
 
There is a massive three-storey barn was once used to house Van Horne's prize-winning Clydesdales.
 
The island changed hands several times after the Van Horne family sold it in 1961, although each sale included the mansion's furnishings.
 
Norman Langdon was the last private owner of the island before the province acquired it in 1982 and designated it a national historic site. Langdon had real estate dreams for Ministers Island that never did materialize. He earned about $78,000 from the auction in 1977, an effort to recuperate some of his losses.
 
"My mother called it a barn sale," said Mary Palmer, whose parents lived on the island in the early 1970s, her father a grounds keeper for Langdon. Palmer spent the summer of 1973 on the island with her parents, memories she cherishes today.
 
Palmer said her parents bought a few items at the auction, items that she has since returned to the Van Horne Estate.
 
"I think it's their home, it's where they need to be," Palmer said. Over the last two years she has donated white embroidered linens, small tables, chairs, and a standing chalk board that once belonged to Van Horne's grandson Billy.
 
Palmer said she drives down from her home in Woodstock at least once a year to spend time on the island, a place her father loved.
 
"You just get over there and a feeling takes over," she said. "It's hard to describe."
 
Her donations are one small part of the monumental task to reassemble the Van Horne Estate. Bits of plaster have fallen off in the house and a corner of the barn's foundation is starting to give way, a repair that Haun of the Van Horne Estate said could cost upwards of $150,000.
 
"We have to shore up what we have before we can do anything else," Haun said.
 
Money is tight for the non-profit, but he said he hopes that as more people are exposed to the island, the more inclined they'll be to lend a hand or even donate money to help fund the repairs.
 
"It's a huge part of the legacy of Canadian history," he said of Ministers Island. "It ties into the railroad, which ties this country together from one end to the other, and we have a piece of it here in New Brunswick."