NOVEMBER 2025

Editorial

Dear Friends, It is my great pleasure to introduce you to a relatively new citizen of Sackville. Ontario-born Christian Corbet comes from a long line of notable ancestry hailing from Guernsey, Channel Islands. He moved to Sackville in 2014. In this issue of The White Fence we are grateful to Christian for sharing his research on one of Sackville’s fine older homes, Broadmoor Manor, 382 Main Street. Christian is an independent creative, a sculptor, painter, and portraitist, who has worked in several media, including oils, watercolour, bronze, clay, and textiles. He has received commissions for his work since the mid-1990s from bodies as diverse as the Royal Canadian Navy and, as he informed me, “the person next door.” Commissioned pieces include a coronation portrait of HRH King Charles III and a portrait of Dame Jane Goodall. His work can be found in private, public, and corporate collections in Canada, Great Britain, and Europe, examples being The Canadian Museum of History and the Crown Collection. In many of these collections he is the first and only Canadian to be so honoured. As well, he has published in numerous arts journals. In Part 1 of this issue he discusses the architecture of Broadmoor Manor and in Part 2 he will provide an account of the people who have lived in this venerable house over the years. I met Christian Corbet by chance on one of my regular “exercise walks” from our house to the Campbell Carriage Factory. We introduced ourselves and when I learned he was researching Broadmoor Manor you can imagine how happy I was to learn that he would share his efforts with The White Fence. I jumped at the chance to inform him that the results of his work on this historic home would be of great interest to the readership of this newsletter. Without hesitation, he mentioned that he would be most happy to forward the results of his work to us for The White Fence. What follows is a detailed account of a special home in Middle Sackville dating back to the early twentieth century.

Enjoy!

—Peter Hicklin

Broadmoor Manor, Part 1

Edmund Burke’s Queen Anne Revival in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada: Form, Finish, and a 1913 Reinvention

by Christian Corbet

Introduction

Broadmoor Manor in Sackville, New Brunswick, occupies a singular position within Atlantic Canada’s domestic architecture. Commissioned in 1907 and built in 1907-08 by J. W. S. Black and designed by his brother-in-law, the eminent Toronto architect Edmund Burke, the house exemplifies late Victorian Queen Anne Revival sensibility translated to an Edwardian Maritime context: richly textural surfaces, asymmetrical massing, animated rooflines, and a social program that displays privilege and hospitality. The building’s 1913 expansion—adding an enlarged dining room, a dedicated library, and an advanced principal bedroom suite with ensuite and balcony, as well as an uncommon bomb shelter— registers an early-twentieth-century shift toward privacy, hygiene, and modern convenience without sacrif icing Burke’s picturesque exterior language. The property’s remarkable fenestration (50+ windows) and circulation (30+ doors), and the period note that the fish scale wall shingles were originally painted red, further index an architecture of light, air, and theatrical presence.1 What follows is a close architectural reading of Broadmoor Manor’s exterior and interior, a reconstruction (from description and typo- logical precedent) of its spatial organization, and a consideration of the 1913 alterations as both a stylistic and social modernization. The essay situates the house against Queen Anne domestic design across Canada—especially in Toronto and the Maritimes—and outlines how Burke’s authorial hand negotiates regional materials and climate. It is intended as a scholarly account for historians and preservationists.