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David William McKay Photographer
A St. Stephen native, Mr. McKay set up his first studio there, later a studio in St. Andrews in May of 1889, a small building on King Street next to the County Records Office. 1889 was an exciting and eventful year for St. Andrews. The St. Andrews Land Company had been formed the year before, and in two months after Mr. McKay's arrival, had completed construction of the Algonquin Hotel, with plans for a golf course, cottage development at Indian Point, complete with running water and electricity for both it and the Town. The Canadian Pacific Railway was about to lease the running rights for the New Brunswick Railway system, and it seemed as though fortune was about to smile on the long-suffering economy of St. Andrews, for it bid fair to become not only a watering place of the first order on the east coast of North America, but also a terminus of the C. P. R. . Though neither future panned out as gloriously as many hoped, the course of the Town's fortunes took a turn for the better and Mr. McKay was on hand to record these changes in some very handsome photographs. Taken together his pictures convey an excellent sense of St. Andrews at this particular point in his history, a time when the Town was drawing vacationers interested in a rustic get-away not too far from the madding crowd.
                  McKay's work, both studio and field, is high quality, and he continued to photograph well into the next century. The St. Andrews Beacon summed up things nicely in an 1894 remark: "The secret of Mr. McKay's photographs," wrote Editor Robert Armstrong, "is to be found in the fact that they are true to Nature, as well as being artistically finished."
                  McKay died in 1937, aged 67. Without his camera the history of St. Andrews would be a great deal poorer. •