Hopetoun Barn – Your PEI Cottage

Property & History

The larger property is the centre of one of the great old estates on PEI. You enter by going down this drive from the Bunbury Road.

The main house is here and the barn is on the right.

You are close enough to get help if you need it but quite private.

This property is the homestead part of the old Bunbury Estate. Click on any photo to see it larger.

Here is an overview of the connection back to Charlottetown after the building of the railway. The Bunbury Road that now crosses Fullerton Marsh and goes onto Mermaid and points East, ended at the main house. It would have gone up what is now Premier’s Lane. The Bunbury Road was in effect the driveway to the main house!

Getting to Charlottetown was not easy then. Before the railway bridge, you would have crossed to Charlottetown by ferries running from either Southport or Kelly’s Point. The remnant of the old road to Kelly’s point, can be found today at Cotton’s Park that runs to the water.

This map below is earlier still and shows the detail of Lot 48 before the railway.

The Brook was dammed to drive a shingle mill. The dam is till there as is the pond but the mill has long gone. This was a full on working landscape then. Not only farming but shipbuilding as well. At least 7 schooners were built here as well. The Bovyer estate ran in 1798 all the way to Kelly’s Point on the West and to Fullerton’s Marsh to the East.

By the 1930′s the farm had shrunk in size but had become one of the most modern and important farms in Canada. J Walter Jones, later Premier of PEI, had married into the family and had developed the best dairy farm in Canada. One of his cows, Abegweit Milady, held the world’s record for butterfat production. One of his bulls brought an unheard of price of $25,000 in the late 1920′s. In 1931, he was awarded the Master Breeders Award from the Holstein-Friesian Association. It was the first time this award was ever presented to an individual. Jones was also one of the pioneers in the silver fox industry.

Here is how the home farm looked in 1936 at its peak.

The Bunbury Road runs from left to right [West to east] the main drive is in the centre. The small gap at the beginning is a small barn. I bet that this was for winter and the mud season giving access to the main road. What is now Premier’s lane runs from the bottom left to the house forming a wonderful circular drive in fron of the old house – which had to be pulled down in 1972. You will just catch the railway line in the bottom left. The Bunbury Station was a few yards away to the west.

Here is the home farm in 1958.

Jones had been dead 4 years and the farm would have been on the turn.

Here is the site today taken by Google.

At this level not much has changed. But at a detailed level it has. The old house had to be pulled down. The new house was buit in the early 1970′s by Lloyd and Marion Palmer. They also extended the old barn to the right [East] of the new house – the shiny roof. Lloyd built a half mile horse training track on the green field on the right. I still mow the track and walk my dogs every day there.