Old St. Andrews

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Railroad Hotel - Kennedy's

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Kennedy's Hotel now stands on the site of the old Railroad Hotel. The building probably acquired its name in 1847, the year in which the St. Andrews and Quebec Railway got underway but operated as the Ross Hotel and the L. L. Copeland Hotel in the decades before that. Regular stages ran from the Hotel to Saint John. Edward Pheasant seems to have come up with the name Railroad Hotel; it was also known informally as the Pheasant Hotel. After Mr. Pheasant came Michael Clarke, and the Hotel became known--again only informally--as the Clarke Hotel. The Hotel burned in 1874 and Clarke was projecting a new building on the same site when he died prematurely at age 40. After a few years Angus Kennedy, whose own hotel had burned at the corner of Water and Augustus in 1879, erected the present-day Kennedy's Hotel in 1881. The Railroad Hotel was a business hotel, occupied year round by salesmen, travelling photographers and dentists, and for the summer term by vacationers, what few there were in the middle part of the century. During the winter it was a frequent meeting place for committees and for celebrations of various sorts, as the extracts from the St. Andrews Standard report. The building seems to have been originally the home of Colonel Thomas Wyer, one of the original grantees of the town.